I'd forgotten what it was like to feel attractive. Without foolish false modesty, or Kanye West compliment gropes, somewhere after my Prince Charming first contact amid a University dance studio, I relinquished all sense of personal sexiness, all concepts of individual desirability to a dimly recalled fantasy state, past-perfect, ethereal, cloudy, an odd flash of memory already faded, yellow, dim, gone. I know why. To be devoted to real love requires total concentration, complete selflessness; you need to give as instinct all of yourself to another, faster than reflex. And I am in love in an imperfect world, where my relationship, along with my integrity, tolerance, and sanity are under constant attack.

And I am a Black man.

Within the first three months of my connection with Angel, I learned that I would never be good enough for her, according to the world around us. African American/ Asian American pairings were never common at Cornell, or anywhere else, and everyone regarded us as an oddity, a carnival sideshow, an interracial Bobby and Whitney without the substance abuse to explain our impossible union. We were never meant to last, according to the prevailing wisdom, what 'they' say, or any Delphic oracle your modern world wishes to consult. Mike Lowry, voice cracked with grave concern years later, once told me that the two of us were supposed to meet, hook up for a while, have innocent, wondrous sex, and break up before life got complicated. How could we coexist, an angel and a demon, a princess and a pauper, Beauty and the Beast? Wear rose-colored Lens Crafters; from the outside, gaze upon your perversion of our scene. Watch Angel swoon under primitive, predatory pheromones, surrender her nubile body, her agile mind, her unblemished spirit, to the criminal Cro-Magnon clad in midnight leather and grim, black combat boots, a real life Vandal Savage. From your tyrannical third-person vantage point, omnipotent and cruel, as far removed from reality as taxation without representation, stare as the petite Chinese daughter, pristine, innocent, pure, tragically serves an indefinite term of indentured sexual servitude, brutal, bloody, alone, shanghaied by the maniacal Melanin Manson, the latest receptacle of a demented psyche's antisocial fun. Rip her silk blouse, snatch the jade pendant. Bruised butterscotch breasts betray debauchery through submission, reveal sadism and suffering and sadness. Hear shrill screams. Close wet eyes. Irradiated by unrefined, unrestrained, unconscionable, unforgivable Blackness, the kidnapped, stolen, helpless Angel struggles against an unbreakable mental sorcery designed to undercut her common sense, your common protest -- the only future I can possibly provide involves poverty, pain, and early death. Social ostracism, financial meltdown, cynical victimhood transfer from my genes and my words, taint all I contact with ruin and disrepair and hate, a reverse King Midas iced out in conflict diamond-encrusted spinning G-Unit bling specially ordered from Jacob the Jeweler. I am a Black man. All my love hurts.

Human hydrochloric acid, the Modern American Black Man represents Death. His corrosive disposition towards his country, his community, his culture, his own people, unravels the worn and scorched Stainless Banner Betsy Ross sowed. No, that's not a typographical error; whether thirteen stars or fifty, for many Black Americans the Stars and Stripes and the Southern Cross interchange easily. Ask Mississippi's David Banner for natural disaster details. The Modern American Black Man murders; syncopated Smith and Wesson snare drums and high velocity hot lead hi-hats deliver hardcore street backbeats for disaffected American cherubs thirsty for casual homophobia and commonplace misogyny, shaken, not stirred, with a crunk juice chaser. Uncle Sam's deserved curse resides within Uncle Tom's Cabin; the modern American Black man shoots his fellow man for pocket change after he jacks his fellow man for pocket crack. Yes, it's 2006, and we'll still rob you in Compton and blast you in Miami. The Modern American Black Man respects power through violence, because power through violence remains the base method his country, his community, his culture and his own people choose, with every police harassment first encounter and unlawful drug search and warrantless wiretap and faux speeding detention and mistreated emergency medicine gunshot wound treatment and outsourced manufacturing job and student loan interest rate increase and Hollywood pimp glorification and bombastic Establishment-authorized Black civil rights demagogue and state sponsored, ratings approved syndicated reality television show, where ebony males flee through boarded, dilapidated federal housing projects with speed and fear and failure to escape burly, mustachioed over-forty municipal super-soldiers with thick, red-haired forearms, bloody black steel nightsticks, barking Glock nine millimeters, and single-minded determination to serve the public trust and protect the innocent with feigned amnesia coupled with Sean Penn charisma towards any pesky American Civil Liberties Union-patrolled law that impedes their righteous vengeance and furious anger -- this is what Americans choose to eliminate their nigger problem. Beat Black bodies. Rip Black flesh. Break Black bones. Protect us, Officer Volpe. Broomsticks not included.

Real life does not include a user's manual; no Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth achieve necessary relevance in modern African American life, regardless of lapsed Wu Tang affiliate Killer Priest's impressively innovative poetic license to kill microphones or later-day Black Buddha Bishop T.D. Jakes' excessively egotistical media presence. The sad truth is that most people, especially African Americans, require a guiding mental principle, a personal grand unified theory to productively interact with American life given its damaging contradictions. Whether consciously aware of these prevailing themes, most people need a standard, a rock, the ability to judge and be judged by something rational and logical and honest and sensible. Whether popular morality or organized religion or personal spirituality garnered from intense individual reflection and contemplation, most people need to believe in something. Given this, the Modern American Black Man's easy distrust toward justice, open antagonism toward order, plain hatred of peace strikes a mortal wound within our horrified body politic. Unchecked, the Modern American Black Man infects Lady Liberty with acquired innocence deficiency syndrome, atrophies our gallant George Washington greatness, neuters nobility bought with industry and conviction and sacrifice in conflicts foreign and domestic. Ironically, some insist there's no connection with the rampant social construction of the Black man as serial rapist, perverse and frantic, obsessed with Missy Anne's hairless, moist, pale, pink vulviform, lightly dusted with Johnson's Baby Powder, and the sociopolitical rape liberal Black men force upon mainstream American political thought, with dry phallic thrusts of radical speech and non-lubricated black leather revolutionary fisting; the Issac Hayes produced soundtrack meticulously blends the choked sobs of widowed Black schoolteachers for absent human freedom and the twisted grimaces of incarcerated Black scarfaces at unnecessary inhuman injustice. The vilified Kanye West, inarticulate and unintelligent with clashing baby blue Ralph Lauren dress shirt and nuclear holocaust yellow orange Akademics sweater provides the perfect sleeper candidate for nationally broadcast Black rage over the Hurricane Katrina debacle; Rolling Stone offers his next assignment as your next Jesus of Nazareth. African American opportunism need not lead America to ignore serious public policy problems within Black America, but remember, the prevailing wisdom characterizes Black masculinity, regardless of form or shape, as Death. No one goes out of his way to help the Grim Reaper with his homework.

It must be understood: for years, I considered myself repulsive, sickening, ugly. Ugly, by design; ugly, without end; ugly without the possibility of parole. To live as a person or color in the United States of America one must contend with omnipresent standards of beauty believed natural by their palefaced beneficiaries and thought desirable by all audiences, target and otherwise. Everyone absorbs relatively similar media input, including but not limited to the negative, divisive social programming that justifies rampant inequality, generational poverty, conspicuous consumption and hate. I am a Black man, in America: if I didn't hate myself I'd be insane. What I did not consider before was that self-hate occurs without explicit or conscious reflection most of the time. Internalized revulsion for one's basic identity can be more damaging than the critical eye most people use to gaze the mirror image, the self within. One of my most vivid childhood remembrances involves sitting on the large bed in my parents' room somewhere around age seven, eyes bright and brown and tortured and bloodshot, a bawling victim of some forgotten racial slight this inconsequential child could neither combat nor defend against. Perhaps some White teacher refused my rightful grades to promote her White students, or some fellow White classmate spat some racial slur at me he learned at home; I know those incidents happened later. What I'm certain of, is that whatever the conflict, it was racial, because I never forgot the question I asked my patient, saintly mother. Mommy, what's so good about being Black? Taken aback, she detonates, livid with pro-Black indignation toward her wayward charge, warns against the inferiority cumulonimbus she spies within my internal atmosphere. Sorry Dr. King, but Funtown is still closed to colored children.

Twenty-four years into this chaotic sensory input overload called real life, I realize our collective central nervous system transmits malicious software to all plugged into wesciv.net, the Western Civilization network, and this self-replicating stereotype shareware sickens the concentrated melanin masses to benefit their lighter counterparts. Notice the genius present -- past anonymity, beyond witness protection, no one, living, dead, or persistent vegetative state, is to blame for the Category Five catastrophe caused to patients infected by modern racism's network borne viruses, whether physical, political, or financial. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness can not exist for the sick and the dying, the venal and the insane. No purple lesions, no persistent cough, no discoloration of the urine or feces whispers this condition, speaks my sickness. I have that Nigger Syndrome. Pray its in remission.

In layman's terms, the Nigger Syndrome results when a Black man (or anyone, really) internalizes the demeaning public prejudices our world broadcasts about him and everyone like him, when he believes with religious certainty the disgusting bigotry and debased hate our irrational human condition manifests for another's profit. No matter how extreme innovation and independence diversify modern media, most Americans expose themselves to a narrow oligarchy of irresponsible, materialist, anti-intellectual, social Darwinist, misogynist, anti-minority synchronizing socialization cast as reputable, reasonable mainstream media input. My fellow Americans, speech is not free, thought is neither independent nor critical, and just because the United States Constitution illegalized the Transatlantic Slave Trade in 1807 and domestic American chattel slavery in 1865 does not mean you don't invest in human capital. Frankly, with increased economic specialization into varied, fast proliferating, insular micro-sectors in our professional classes, supported by the modern corporate university's capitalist-driven endowment competition complex, the United States relies with exponential necessity upon general media input to corral the American body politic into a traditional sociopolitical order recognized by America's middle class and manipulated by America's elites -- no small task for Brian Williams at NBC Nightly News and Steven Spielberg's last big-budget Tom Cruise blockbuster and Steve Jobs' I-pod digital music revolution. Racism works, let's face it; to manifest and distribute the impossible nationalism required to unify three hundred million plus American citizens, some illiterate, some multilingual, some apathetic, some reactionary, some pious, some heretical, our mass media, our collective central nervous system, utilizes prejudice. And it works. The paltry tribalism that abounds on segregated prime-time television and the opinion-editorial pages of our newspapers of record only serve to color the planetary environment into uncomplicated Crayola pastels, devoid of all specificity or complication or passion. We no longer only watch the flickering letterbox full of Must-See situation comedies, we live them; reality television typecasts imitation life in the latest buffoon burlesque of the human experience, concocts inhuman automatons like Omarosa Manigault Stallworth, sparks a laugh track among real people in real places. Today, everyone's scripted.

Perhaps that's the reason Melanin Manson exists, perhaps the end result of an abbreviated lifetime of racist slights and racist moments, of racist liberal pity and racist conservative vitriol, of racist little children who openly compare my slim six foot one African American frame, with burnt sienna skin and hair of lamb's wool, to prehistoric hunter gatherers waxed from antiquity in a constructed African savanna on a floor of New York City's Natural History Museum, of racist parental units who propose sibling celibacy when language differences mistranslate their apocalyptic nightmare pornography fears involving their adult daughter's nighttime festivities, of countless racist first contact situations amid Clorox seas of cellophane people within my age demographic where the Abercrombie first distrust the Negro they don't know, then smile nervously at the unknown entity's risque humor, and then laugh uncontrollably at every comment or sound said Negro emits, regardless of humor or logic, even if he's simply asking for directions to the nearest bathroom! -- perhaps the checkmate, the endgame, the climax of our ongoing Maybelline minority morality play involves living with a disease instead of killing what ails. We manage symptoms while the real cancer multiplies unopposed, embrace quality of life rather than real living. Do you know the link between Michael Jackson and Robert Kelly, between Tupac Shakur and John Allen Muhammad? At some point in their lives, someone treated them like a nigger, and they believed that treatment was just. So in a world where they drink pain for crimes of birth they can't change, odd life choices, open perversion, self-destructive thug nationalism and psychotic domestic terrorism display respective variance in the Modern American Black Man's coping mechanisms. My suggestion? End the therapy; begin the healing.

I am a Black man. There are no niggers here.