Why is it that some poor black people, after all the progress that has been made in desegregating our society and exposing racism, have initiated the practice of calling each other "nigger" as a term of endearment? It may have to do with self-deprecation: to reduce the impact in such historically significant words, black people may use this word pejoratively. Listen to any hard-core rap song and you will hear the ubiquitous use of the words "nigger" and "bitch." These terms, in use by groups of black racists who inhabit the inner-cities, are part of a crude culture that is destroying the African-American community.

The use of the words "nigger" and "bitch" is not, unfortunately, the only symptom of the self-destructive behavior displayed by these black racists. There is the victim ideology which saturates their culture. Poor and uneducated black men and women who can't find jobs tend to blame their lack of employment opportunity on the system, which they say is geared against the African-American race. Many African-Americans are wiling to work hard for their prosperity, but those lower class blacks who are residents in the inner-cities often fall into the trap of expecting help and therefore do not take it upon themselves to achieve. Instead, they scapegoat everything and everyone, from "the system" to the "legacy of white supremacy" in this country.

The use of the word "nigger" indicates how much these black racists are stuck in the past. Almost every social ill in America today having to do with race is blamed on four centuries of oppression. This is Jesse Jackson's favorite rhetorical tool: to talk about 400 years of oppression and how this oppression is so ingrained in our politics and culture that the African-American community needs a helping hand in every form of life to help it overcome this oppression.

However, the federal government and the saturation of politically correct terms in our culture have stopped the poorest in the African-American community from growing because dependent blacks think they need a helping hand every step of the way to maturity. If you have ever gone to a general store and have seen black welfare recipients--usually black mothers--buying food, you will notice that it is primarily junk food. There are few essential nutrients contained in their diets which most people learn are necessary once they reach adulthood. These members of the African-American community are still stuck in infancy and childhood and have not matured enough to the point of adolescence where they can be confident to accomplish on their own and by their own merit.

If anything, the word "nigger" exacerbates the racial situation and keeps African-Americans stuck in the past. Their thoughts revolve around a "white man, black man" world in which the two races are diametrically opposed. As the former Speaker of the California House of Representatives, Willie Brown, said when his predominately white congress failed to change his leadership in the House, "We taught those white boys a lesson." You would seldom hear a white male or female, or a member of any other race use such language.

In its quest for solidarity and brotherhood to combat 400 years of oppression, the African-American community has come to see itself as a whole, living as one and achieving as one. This has fostered the identity of a supposed black culture in the African-American community in which, if you don't talk a certain way and don't act a certain way you are considered as trying to act white. A member of the black community must speak in terms of brothers and sisters, as if the whole of the African-American community is one entity, feeling the same emotions and having the same experiences. There are no individual members of the black community any more, just black people who share a pervasive group mentality that results from the solidarity movement.

Why is it that when General Colin Powell's ratings went up in the polls last week most major newspapers reported that Powell's popularity was higher among white people than among black people? The answer may lie in the fact that many poor and racist black people see Powell as abandoning their race.

This theme of race abandonment and being a traitor is echoed by Derrick Z. Jackson of the Boston Globe and columnist Molly Ivins. In a recent column ("Questioning Powell's beliefs," op-ed, Sept. 27) Jackson says that Powell "ate political caviar" while "the people in his sea of black and Hispanic faces were being told that ketchup was a vegetable, their mothers were welfare queens and the quintessential criminal in America was black rapist Willie Horton," and that Powell "is but an instrument for white people to feel smug about solving racism."

Ivins says it more literally: "Powell is not a very black man." She further says that Powell "is what is known in some circles as a light 'n' bright" and that the question of Powell's "cultural blackness" will come up. What is it, after all, to be black? Is it to be poor and oppressed? Is it to be uneducated and out of the realm of the political and cultural elite? Because if it is, then the black race shall remain forever oppressed, poor and uneducated.

This theme of diametric opposites in race relations fosters the whole concept of the black community being at war with the white community. It is a matter of "us" versus "them" instead of "we." As witnessed in the O.J. Simpson trial, the predominately black jury failed to convict Simpson because if they had, they would have been forced to live among their communities with the ridicule of being traitors. This sense of being at war has carried over to the inner cities, only it has been heightened to the nth degree. Brought about by drugs and gangs, the culture in the inner cities created by racist members of the African-American community is devoid of respect for other people, devoid of any respect for human life and devoid of any sense of community.

These black racists feel a need to do this since they perceive it to be the only way to achieve status in life without abandoning the black community and joining the white culture. Multiculturalism is good to the extent that it enables us to experience different realms of the world, but the black community has taken it to the extreme, emphasizing the divisions in our world instead of our common grounds.

To single out one of these fatal symptoms as one to be cured ignores the fact that they are all related. The only way the racist members of the black community can raise themselves up from being the dregs of society is to concentrate on purging its culture of self-debasement, stop looking at society in terms of race and start looking at America in terms of one big community, not one in which African-Americans are criticized if they are able to achieve in a white culture. These problems are a result of the last 400 years, but in order to solve them, African-Americans must be willing to move beyond such antiquated modes of thought based on those centuries. It is not the 19th century, or the 1960s, anymore.