This guttural, anguished scream against the obvious minstrelsy of modern rap offers few solutions and scant hope. In fall 2006 an African American advocates lynching to counteract the unceasing coonery of top selling rap artists like the Ying Yang Twins, 50 Cent, and Jim Jones -- no, I can't believe it either. Any person of color who advocates lynching in any form, for any reason, either does not understand the utter inhumanity and soulless depravity of the original American terrorism, or has already become so detached and so desensitized to his own melanin that his perspective exists outside the barest extremities of unreasonable speech. To lynch is to hate with passion, to kill without remorse, to pillage and slaughter and dismember others based on your hatred of their shared intrinsic identity, and to expect general praise and communal accolades from your fellow Americans amid the bloody greenery of your sociopathic escapades. Before online celebrity sex tapes and baseball, lynching was America's number one pastime, a favored activity John Q. Public never truly laid down. Even today, African Americans endure domestic hate crimes in larger number and proportion than any other group -- no African American should, in my opinion, willfully support lynch law, in any sense, period. NYOIL's cynical suggestion posits lynching as conscious African American uplift, and deserves unceasing scorn and consistent derision for such confused racial solidarity.

For those so battered and bruised by persistent anti-Black (yet all-American) racism that their soft ebony skins glisten purple with the agitated sweat of revenge and shake randomly with the nervous tics of vindictiveness, burning down the master's house with his own kerosene may appeal. There's something underdog, subversive, counterculture (and therefore, cool) about the double agent protagonist for the African American urbanite of my generation, bastard children of James Bond and Tony Montana. What is the ubiquitous Black phrase "from corporate to ghetto" if not an open acknowledgement of our silently disarming disingenuousness? We identify with the stealth sniper, the silent killer, because decades of post-Civil Rights Movement social programming convinces the most reasoned and reasonable among us that the sensible next step toward that bright, black utopia called "There" in the Black community involves the forced injection of our best and brightest into all institutions of education, capital, influence, and power in modern American society. Affirmative action, repugnant though it may remain for those privileged Black thinkers who can afford to wax philosophical about the indignities of matriculation and hiring decisions based on factors outside simple merit, continues to command nigh-total support in the Black community because we can never shed our plantation two-face. "We wear the mask that grins and lies," wrote Paul Laurance Dunbar in 1896, and frankly, as NYOIL's boorish consciousness points out, our mascara's running.

It's so utterly repugnant, his video's concept of lynching as community uplift, so unbelievably bad that one must assume the artist himself simply does not recognize the import of his chosen diction, does not understand the unmitigated hell of the lynching. Lynching can not be redeemed or recast to serve the interests of Black people; like the original American hatespeech -- nigger, it will always remain a tool of anti-African American antagonism, beyond misplaced reclamation and earnest colorblind casting. Real anti-racist action innovates; useful pro-Black creativity always offers something new and untried and never before seen. The sit-in, the teach-in, the boycott, the protest march, the prayer meeting, the voter registration drive, the impassioned poetry of radical ideologues and the building takeovers of student status quo antagonists -- all these African American Civil Rights Movement innovations outline the modern social movement playbook every emergent minority group currently utilizes to redefine freedom for their members and force recognition of their specific agendas into our attention deficit disordered pop up populace. Black people wrote the original identity politics playbook. African Americana exudes creative resistance without self-hate; the literary genius of James Baldwin and the moody artistry of Miles Davis, the compelling humanity of Sidney Poitier and the rhetorical supremacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. provide profiles of the exceptional, but not the exception. We are both beautiful and Black; we learned this with bitter tears and inexpressible sacrifice, hanging from the poplar trees of Billie Holiday's America.