Welcome to 21st Century Toming. The cool, articulate ("He's very well-spoken") and well-dressed Negroes offer dangerous confusion to too many younger people, who often get these messages framed by such prattle as "post-civil rights" and "third wave" thinking. What appears at first glance to be a brand spanking new road map to lead us to The Promised Land is little more than a playbook for a political minstrel show. A masquerade of high-level Toming with a new title: black neo-conservatism. Fronts for racism and their partners-in-crime, James and Jane Crow, Esq. And Negroes who have lost their minds.

When I was a little boy growing up on the farm down in South Carolina, me and my running partners would often ramble the woods and roads all day long. Doing nothing in particular except bojangling around. Momma used to call it "plunderin."

My childhood was wrapped in a cocoon of comfort and fun in spite of the iron foot of Apartheid. White folks were mean. Of course, black folks were, too.

When the Klan tried to scare us one night by demonstrating in front of Mt. Sinai AME, they got chased away by the men of the church with shotguns and rifles and pistols and baseball bats. (Our baseball diamond was across the road from our church, where my daddy, uncles, and cousins  played other teams every Saturday during the summer, and we would have cold drinks on ice, hot barbecue sandwiches drenched with vinegar and red pepper, and the best ice cream in the world.).

To my recollection, there was never a public Klan demonstration in Clarendon County again. People visiting from Up North used to say, "You got some mean niggers down there in Shiloh."

The stench of racism was abundant, but somehow in our cocoon, a slice of what we experienced as a good life was carved out and preserved for us "chilruns." It was amusing and ironic the way people would greet one another. Not the fancy "Hello" or the ill-mannered "Hi." The standard was, "How yah moma an’ nim? Car still running" Our culture was intimate, playful, ironic, mischievous, paradoxical,  respectful.

One day, a group of us were walking down Highway 53, enjoying the summertime. As we walked pass old man Johnny Johnson's store (that would be "sto" back then) and filling station, Mr. Johnson and a few other old white men sat around talking and sitting on drink crates. One of them, cackling and grinning, hollered in our direction, "Who niggers' y'all?"

We were all in our early teens, not grown men, and this was in the early sixties. The ominous and stern warnings we had all received from our parents about Emmit Till were still ringing in our heads. We were frightened, humiliated, and mad, too.

While a lot of my running partners were from share cropping families, my parents owned their land, as did my father's parents, going back to l908 when Granddaddy West Fulwood bought 500 acres, land on which we and my uncle's family lived and worked. We had a brand new house, and Daddy bought a new truck and tractor every two years. The notion that someone owned us was simply not within my frame of reference; it was just phonetically out of harmony with my ears.

Of course, I knew vainglorious white people considered themselves superior, but I thought of it simply as a strange and silly notion practiced by an alien people. To me, if anybody was "superior," it was my daddy and moma and my uncles and aunts and cousins; Miss Lillie Mae Pickens and Mr. Mosa Dickey.

 So to us, the shit-don't-stink-white-folks were just "crazy white folks." And the high walls of segregation kept us children largely insulated from the viciousness of racism, although we were intuitively aware that something was terribly wrong with the world.

Old man Johnson's insult did not pass my ears without a summons to my memory that his 9 year old grandson, Timmy, had always referred to my maternal granddaddy, as "Willie."

A regal and gentle man, he never uttered a single protest to this egregious degradation. My blood would boil each time this happened, but I was too young (same age as Timmy) and too respectful of Granddaddy to say, "My Granddaddy's name is Mr. William Douglas Moore!"

I was even more angry and embarrassed when my granddaddy would answer, "How you Mr. Johnson?" So, my reaction to the call from old man Johnson's, "Who Niggers y'all?" to a group of children, can only be described as a disorienting stew of indignation and rage. But my rage quickly turned to confusion and utter shame when one of my buddies responded, "We some of Mr. Culleye's niggers!"

Evidently, the insanity of racism and its crippling affects have no respect for the passage of time or the birth of successor generations. You simply have to have your mind right. Be you Choochie-Boy Robinson, Coota Bug McKnight, or Congressman Harold Ford. Whether you are dressed in overalls or Brooks Brothers, you simply have to have your mind right to deal with both white people and Negroes talking backwards. And it is clear that Harold Ford's mind ain't right. He might as well be a smooth talking pimp selling his sister to the highest bidder in a urine-stained alley.

Make no mistake, African Americans need debate, new ideas, deep think, vigorous discourse, a discussion of the merits, brainstorming (even a slow drizzle would help) and a clean break from old tired-ass, sclerotic ideas and strategies that simply won't work in a fundamentally new world.

New ideas and vigorous debate is one thing, but to just lie and deceive people; to risk the health and lives of workers, seniors, children, survivors, and people with disabilities, is both intellectually and morally bankrupt. And probably some even more mean and ugly things that I don't have the big words to convey.  Grandmoma used to call it "Devilment." And being a black elected official is not a warrant for lying.

I can think of no better depiction of Bush's plan for Social Security and his 19th Century agenda. Few things could be more evil, including when our preacher was trying to "talk up on sump-um" with my sister back in 1962.

When you boil it all down to gravy, I reckon some people just want to be a U.S. Senator so bad that they are  willing and eager to be one of Mr. Bush's "niggers."

A postscript: Later during that hot summer in 1960, sadly, somebody burned down old man Johnson's tobacco barn, along with three of his tractors and a combine. It was great ball of fire shooting high into the dark skies of old ugly South Carolina. I skipped all the way home.

Mr. Fullwood is an activist and writer living in Washington, DC.