All across America, the black community remains profoundly aggrieved by the explication enunciated by Michael Richards. While it may be hard to find anyone in the country who didn’t find Richards’s comments obnoxious, racism remains very much alive in our culture.

Although many often choose to presume that race doesn’t matter in our society, racial tension and division increases exponentially year after year.

Over the past year we have seen discrimination against Mexican immigrants, discrimination against blacks in the Hurricane Katrina debacle, and now the Laugh Factory rage on Nov. 17 continues to remind us that racial intolerance is endemic in the American experience, and this disdain has historical significance.

The etymology of the n-word is derived from the Latin word “denigrare,” which is translated in English “to denigrate.” The word in essence invalidates the humanity of black people all across the world. This historical implication was first expressed by the Constitutional decision of 1787 that adorned black people with the title “3/5 human.”

Richards’s comments bring to the American consciousness the fundamental truth that blacks have yet to occupy their rightful place among their peers. His rampage is reminiscent of the “good old days” in which racism was applauded and viewed just as American as apple pie and Chevrolet.

Let’s not forget the days of old, when politicians ran on racist platforms; let’s not forget segregation, and the history of Milwaukee’s de facto segregation policies. Does anyone remember Lloyd Barbee and his fight to end this type of public segregation?

In this, our 21st century, explicit bigotry is relatively absent from the public sphere. However, it thrives in its covert form, and can be seen at work in private venues such as a company’s hiring and promotion processes. Throughout the marketplace, the gatekeepers in the dominant culture make everyday decisions based on a person’s socioeconomic status.

The recent use of the n-word in the public sphere and the pervasive discrimination against minorities in America should remove any false notions that our country has attained egalitarianism.

Just one week after Richards’s diatribe, six Muslim scholars were removed from a US Airways flight simply because they stopped to pray prior to boarding the plane. The question we must ask ourselves is: would six white clergymen be removed from a plane if they were engaged in prayer? Of course not.

We must conscientiously create healthy dialogue that will extirpate the barriers that divide us. Although I am impressed by the black community’s united stand against Richards’s psychotic episode, I urge them to use this unification to cultivate a national forum on race relations.

Even though Richards’s utterances were deleterious, they have afforded us the opportunity to examine once again the American racial phenomenon. On the local level, I exhort activists, community leaders, clergymen, laymen, teachers and scholars to organize civil forums that will encourage racial debate for the purpose of reconciliation.

In my opinion, one of the greatest accomplishments the new democratic Congress can achieve in 2007 is to enact legislation that will once and for all eliminate discrimination in all areas of our society.

Richards is guilty of more than the n- word; he is guilty of racial hatred and intolerance. We must use the satirical prose to expose the hypocrisy of those who stymie racial harmony.

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