The racism and selfishness of African-American culture is becoming the largest single destructive force in the United States.

I know that simply by saying this I’m going to be branded a racist by the very people whose influence I intend to criticize. And it’s a lie. I’m not a racist – at least not in the hate-filled, self-serving manner that most of the myopic sycophants who Black Americans currently allow to speak for them are.

But the lie will probably be spoken anyway by people who don’t know me. The people who will say this have no knowledge of my years of marching in celebrations for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

They won’t ask about the night I fought five brothers of a White racist fraternity, one of whom held me at knifepoint, who targeted my roommate and I simply because he was Black.

No one will research the countless columns I wrote for Florida Today or the Vero Beach Press-Journal to find the records of my speaking out against racial hatred by Whites.

African-American culture is not concerned with the truth. African-American culture is only concerned with itself.

You’ll notice I draw a clear and definite distinction between African-American culture and Black Americans. Black Americans are individuals. They are Americans just the same as all of us, to be honored and afforded all the respect, rights, privileges and dignities that come with citizenship in this blessed nation.

African-American culture wants more than that, though. It claims its members deserve more. The illusion African-American culture tries to create in the hearts and minds of Black Americans is that they are somehow still experiencing the conditions of chattel slavery. Racist leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton manipulate situations and abuse their positions to draw imaginary parallels between free and sovereign Black citizens of today with bound and captive slaves of 150 years ago.

This lie is patently obvious. No Black American today experiences anything even remotely close to the oppressively inhuman conditions that some slaves were forced to endure. Further, no Black American today can even pretend to be deprived of personal liberties or opportunities – either by comparison to the slaves that may or may not have been their forebears or by comparison to any of the other 290 million American citizens with whom they share this country.

But, African-American culture seeks to propagate this lie.

Further, aside from lying to Black Americans about their present condition, African-American culture lies to Black Americans about their future. In the absence of a protective government overstructure, African-American culture tells Black Americans, you can never hope to be equal with White men. African-American culture tells Black Americans that other minorities – Hispanics, Asians, Indians – are allied with White Americans in a conspiracy of hatred designed to keep Black Americans poor, stupid and powerless. Like all cultures of deceit and hatred African-American culture has to continue creating more elaborate lies to support its original deception. This original deception was, of course, that Black Americans were no better off than their slave ancestors.

During the early days of the American civil rights movement in the Southern United States, there were horrible abuses of human rights and law, both civil and criminal by White leaders. Various local governments were sporadically applying Federal laws designed to clarify the American provisions of equality. Other local governments, however, were actively avoiding applying these statutes and were even more aggressive in applying their own outdated codes that administered justice – or rather injustice – based upon one’s race.

There was a problem, however. Blacks in the South during the 1940s and early 1950s were still in possession of their memories. The problem this created was that it allowed Black Americans to remember how far they had come in 80 to 90 years. At the time of the conclusion of World War II, there were still men and women alive – albeit only a few – who really, really remembered the sting of the lash; who actually had been the property of a White man at one point during their lives. For someone to have come from that position to a position of even nominal freedom was still something to be acknowledged as progress.

Unfortunately, it was not progress enough. Nor should it have been considered such. But, the way that civil rights activists from the Northeastern and Midwestern United States addressed this complacency was not to call upon the nobler instincts of rural Southern or inner-city Black Americans and ask them to consider the “equality” their grandchildren might inherit. Instead, activists like Dr. King and Julian Bond and Jesse Jackson opted to convince Black Americans they were still in chains and had really made no progress at all.

While we can now claim that this type of speaking was just metaphor, the speakers themselves were well aware of the power of rhetoric on an audience without the context of nuance. Poetic and nobly motivated as the words of these civil rights leaders of the 1950s and 1960s were, they had predicated the appeal of their message upon using rhetoric to motivate an audience who appeared (and indeed was) moving too slowly for the good of the nation that surrounded it. American civil rights and equality had to move faster in the United States than either the Black population wanted to drive it or the White population wanted to allow it. For this reason alone, we should honor Dr. King. He motivated people of both races to increase the pace of change even though the majority of those races were complacent with the current rate of change.

Here is the problem, though.

It is one thing to say something to motivate your troops. It is an entirely different thing to continue saying that thing after a). it is proven to be untrue and b). the battle has been fought and won.

Whatever foundational half-truth the American civil rights movement needed to launch itself, it did not abandon the half-truth when the victories began to pour in. The prudent thing to do after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling or passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or any number of milestones for the cause would have been to acknowledge the progress and the advancements over the conditions that had existed.

Instead the base principle of African-American culture was allowed to fester and set like wet cement around the aspirations of the people it alleged to help. We may have won a victory, the leaders would say, but we are no better off than before. These achievements are good, but they’re not good enough.

And they never will be.

It is this culture of self-induced oppression, an aura of victimization that has surrounded African-American culture since the early 1950s, that still pervades the lives of Black Americans. Regardless of what legislative or regulatory triumphs or justices are afforded to Black Americans as individuals, African-American leaders will tell them that they deserve more.

The reason that African-American culture can blind Black Americans like this is because there is a comfort in oppression, especially in imagined oppression. You get to maintain all of the righteous indignation of being treated inhumanely while suffering only a fraction of the actual indignities.

Of course, here’s where African-American leaders will tell us that none of us has any idea what it’s like to be Black. None of us had felt the sting of racism. This, of course, is hogwash. Other minorities know the feeling, yet they largely do not maintain a false, divisive sense of self-servience. All of us know the feeling of being unjustly treated. The difference in being treated badly because of your race is only superficially different than being treated badly because of your religion or your social class or your age or any number of other factors. All humans are potential victims of these hatreds.

It is African-American culture’s lie – the lie that hate based upon race is a greater evil than any other hate – that allows Black Americans to continue wallowing in self-entitlement and faux indignation.

There is only one way for Black Americans to truly progress beyond the oppression-rich mentality that African-American culture has handed to them as a supposed birthright.

First, Black Americans must confront their own institutionalized racism. When a man like Louis Farrakhan, an avowed enemy of the United States of America and White humans in general, can legitimately pretend to speak for Black Americans, then there can be no hope of greater trust. White racists are disavowed as soon as they open their hate-filled mouths. Black racists, like Ray Nagin, get to run for mayor of their city. The first step in receiving more societal responsibility and authority for Black Americans is in admitting this flaw of African-American culture and rebuking it.

Second, Black Americans must stop withdrawing into their own insular communities and build bridges into the broader community. One of the most successful churches in our area is a church called Truth Revealed Ministry. It was founded by a black pastor who chose to build a multi-ethnic congregation. The need of American society at large to unite with Black Americans is keenly felt. But, the racial rift will only continue to widen unless the work that is done to bridge it is done from both sides.

Finally, both of these decisions to action must be made based upon the answer to a very fundamental question. Black Americans need to ask themselves individually what allegiance they owe to the United States itself. Perpetual victimhood has fogged the lenses of an entire race to the realities of American citizenship. For Black Americans (and especially young Black Americans who have been heavily influenced by African-American culture), there is often very little meaning tied to being an American. Unless this is reversed from within the Black American individual and their communities, there is little sense in even bothering to develop responsible leadership or to reach out to broader American society.