Today is the big national blackout. All African Americans will wear black tonight in an attempt to win a giant game of hide and seek.

Of course that’s not what the black out is! If blacks engaged in some kind of racial Olympiad for kiddie games, we’d want the same rules as anyone else: (Count to 40 one-thousand, no peeksies.)

In the last few months, bigotry has grown to intolerable, incomprehensible, indigestible levels — nooses, Confederate executives, racists dogs:

Does this look like a racist to you?

At the current pace of racial injustice, we can only expect the following to occur next week:

• Monday: I meet with Dog. I accept his apology. He cries on my shoulder. I braid his hair. He doesn’t like my French braiding style. He calls me the N-word. America celebrates. Howie Long gives him a high-five on national TV.
• Tuesday:Brown vs. Board of Education is reversed. Water fountains remain desegregated however.
• Wednesday: Water fountains fall.

When I last wrote about the noose nonsense, it was merely a nuisance. I classified it as an epidemic because no one listens if you say something is just a nuisance. But now it really is an epidemic! (Read: bigger nuisance.)

But who is behind it you ask? Good question. I have compiled a short list of six suspects …

1) Twine salesman: Synthetic fabrics have claimed a larger share of the rope marketplace in recent years, so this could be a classic appeal to the retro move (like those t-shirts you see on skinny white kids). Twine dealers were probably further angered when I called for background checks for all rope buyers.

2) Biggie Smalls: I know he’s dead but hear me out. Last week a noose was found around the neck of a Tupac statue in Georgia. (More mediocre rap artists have statues than you may realize.) The Tupac noose was not tied in the traditional switchback pattern, but was a simple loop instead. The dexterous inabilities to perform semiskilled rope work is consistent with a suspect who is a half-dead zombie.

3) Nature: The most recent nooses to be found Saturday were in the lockers of two black parks department employees. This is the most alarming theory because if true it means Mother Earth harbors a murderous hatred towards the Diaspora (Katrina anyone?). Previously it was believed that noose trees acted like German citizens during WWII — publicly submissive, secretly supportive.

4) Howie Long.

Not you Watson, not you. Crick I would have expected.

As many in the science community have noted, Watson’s racist outburst has overshadowed his career, invalidating his achievements. That’s right, the double helix model is a sham.

Since Watson no doubt infected other scientists with his bigotry, the onus must fall on my shoulders to uncover the real DNA polymer.

Today, I’m proud to unveil the double standard helix:

Instead of adenines, thymines and guanines, the building blocks for life are Cosbys, Websters and Lawrence Fishburnes.

Associated Press

Good gracious. Yesterday a second noose popped up in New York at a post office near ground zero. (BTW if one was trying to lynch the World Trade Center, some sort of giant lasso, constructed of many smaller lassos, would be a more practical instrument.)

Lynching conjectures aside, this noose epidemic needs to be stopped. And here is how I propose to do it …

Hardware stores:

Require a 5-day waiting period for the purchases of twine. The vendor will then do a background check to see if the rope buyer has ever lived in a confederate state.

At the very least, the vendor should ask the customer: “Hey! Are you going to make a noose with that rope?” If the answer is no, this follow-up question should be posed: “Promise?”

Geometricians:

While it could be contentious in an election year to ban the loop outright, we can do our part to promote other shapes that don’t carry racial symbolism: Trapezoid, rhombus, dodecahedron — I never thought I’d say this, but it’s your day in the sun.

Associated Press

You’re damn right I’m demanding an apology. As an excuse for his sexual harassment remarks against Ms. Anucha Sanders, Mr. Thomas tried to argue that there’s a difference between a black man calling a black woman a bitch and a white man calling a black woman a bitch.

As I’ve stated before, ‘we can not have double standards in issues of racism and sexism.’ (With the obvious exception being the playful, endearing employment of “Bitch” by a sassy transgender black in a floral-print silk kimono on a straight white woman — as in ‘Bitch, be a doll and fetch me some aspirins, I’ve got a headache that would put the San Andreas fault to shame.’)

Thomas has not acquiesced to my request, arguing that crucial context was left out that vindicates his response.

So I am moving on then. I now demand an apology from context. Context is the surrounding words that alter a phrase, statement or incendiary remark. Recently Bill O’Reilly was the victim of bad context after his dinner with me at Sylvia’s.

And I’ve been the victim of context before too. Like if a reporter writers that I disparagingly remarked: “diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights,” you might think this was inappropriate stereotype. But what if the text the came before diamond merchant was “I’m looking for some good … ” and the text that proceeded it was “because sapphires and rubies are so out, and Bay Ridge is just too far away!.”

I can’t believe how completely normal Bill O’Reilly was at our dinner last week. He was exactly the same as every other white bigot I’ve ever broken bread with.

He showed up to the Harlem eatery out of breath, a mixture of sweat and tears running down his face. A look of bemused terror clung to him, similar to what an ant must feel when you spray his home with a Super Soaker 150 and his world, previously so safe and moundy, becomes suddenly deluged with water, terror and floating carcases of his little ant friends.

Bill looked comforted to see me. He instantly drew close and whispered: “I’m so scared.”

After hugging me for a good 15 seconds, he whispered in a craze, “They can’t kill me when I’m next to you, you are the black people’s Jesus, right? Or is that OJ? Then he shouted, “Free OJ!”, raised his fist in the black power pose and looked around the room for approval.

A man at the counter shook his head and told him: “Relax, man. Be cool.”

Bill shrieked at this, taking it as a death threat, and lost complete control of his legs. Desperately, he grabbed onto my shoulders for support and half fell to the ground awkwardly, his head dipping perilously close to my crotch. Then he plain gave up and fell flat on his back and just stared up at the ceiling with a completely blank expression — whiteness flushing over his visage.

This tasing incident reminds me of another unjust brutality story, but instead of the victim being a stoner motivated away from his cheese puffs and Capri Suns (the newer, easier-to-insert-the-straw ones) to sprout secret society conspiracy theories, the victims in this other case were defending themselves after being threatened with a noose and a shotgun.

Associated Press

Nooses are so terrible, the mere sight of a loop makes me furiously pound on my keyboard like this: ghsrgjkl;fnhfwojtg (That semicolon suggests my rage can’t be restricted to the QWERTY letter configuration).

It’s nice to put this whole Vick thing behind us and talk about something less absurd than killer dolphins — mystical creatures with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. Yes, that’s right, griffins, specifically of the subgenus Eddie.

As you probably know, use of the n-word is forbidden in all types of multimedia (print, radio, pigeon). Even saying “n-word” is 1/6th as bad of as saying it outright, considering the full word is immeasurably bad, and 1/6th of an immeasurable quantity would still be statistically significant.

All these n-bomb droppings reminds me of a classic dark comedy I saw once in which an ill-mannered, no-good-doing spirit in White Face appears at the third utterance of his name to enact devious (but playful) plots.

Like Beetle Juice, I give you the nigger chart:

One mention of the n-word: Reverend Al shows up at your studio with steam coming out of his nose and ears, fist raised in a “Why-I-oughta” gesture. You apologize. Reverend Al calls 84 media outlets (MSNBC and Creative Loafing first). You become like a fine sardine – canned, possibly pickled.

Excuse me, Mr. Alex “Investigative Reporter” Johnson of MSNBC, but before you go calling people a hoax, maybe you should take a long look in the mirror. (If you don’t see your reflection, it means you are a bigot.)