As are we all, I am the product of my times, particularly my early, "developmental years. Those are, in my experience, the first 15 to 21 years of one's life. As a mid-century "baby boomer," I grew up in the Deep South during the height of the Civil Rights battles. In fact, the city of my youth was the home of the infamous "Bull" Conner - the police chief who so graphically brought the contrast between Southern white hate and black victimization to the nation's eyes. As Conner unleashed the full fury of Southern white racism - manifested by snarling German shepards, high-pressure fire hoses and police batons - the nation's eyes where fixed on the streets and people of my city. Although I was only 10 or 11 at the height of these ignominious events, even I - in the insular life I was in - knew that something was very, very wrong and that change was in the wind.

I had my on little drama at the time. My family had disintegrated. My parents divorced. My two sisters - one older and one younger - was mysteriously with their mother for the remainder of their lives. Equally, mysteriously, I was divvied up to my father and my grandmother. The family as I knew it was drastically and permanently torn apart. I cannot recall seeing my sisters at all for many years and, more tragically, I do not recall seeing my biological mother at all. To this very day, the suddenness and completeness of this fracture remains an undiscussed part of my past.

To the point again, the early 1960s were a time of personal and cultural cataclysm. I remained comparatively untouched by the seething, conflicted cauldron that Birmingham had become. My father remarried within a year and my cobbled but we joined the other white families and fled the city to the suburbs. But, our respite from the "Segregation Wars" was brought to an end my junior year of high school. There came the announcement that the segregated black high school was to be closed and its student were to enroll in the previously segregated white high school. My high school.

I remember at the time there were, in other places, continued confrontations between angry white parents (it was always mostly the parents and not the kids my age) at schools all over the South. But integration came to my school without a whimper or any organized posturing from enraged parents or posturing politicians. The black students came to our high school with the same values, character and goals that the white students had - to learn, to compete and to find their rightful place. Our newly-integrated school went promptly about the work of making our high school - and ourselves - better.

Everything improved immediately. The academics were challenged by bright young minds who could bring new points of view. The music department was infused with the voices of youth that had been singing in their church and schools all their lives. And the athletic department went from mid-level teams to top-tier teams. Our football team, of which I was a proud member, was the first and (still) only undefeated team in school history. My high school, as I remember it today, was what integration could be - if given a chance with open minds and open hearts. When Dr. King said "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," he was dreaming of a school like mine. In 1968, he smiled down on my high school from his place in eternity. But, that place from the late 1960s seems so distant today. Almost 40 years later, we have fallen into a societal morass of failed programs and broken promises. As I began to examine a totally different subject

Edmund Burke once wrote "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." After reading Mr. Steele, I would add this addition: "...or to do the wrong thing for the wrong reasons." The latter will be the thesis argument for several upcoming entries.

In case you haven't noticed, there are a growing number of angry black men in America these days. And it's not the "usual suspects." It's not Al Sharpton who, while not electing (yet!) to call for an American Idol boycott for racism, has managed to stay on TV screens everywhere expressing his outrage over the "Strom-Thurmond-owned-my-ancestor" thing.

It's not Jesse Jackson. Reverend Jackson, apparently, has had some difficulties finding a cause celebre since the Sean Bell incident. It's not even Louis Farrakhan though I am quite sure he still has some choice words for American ears despite his recent illness.

No, the really "angry black men" today are names like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Juan Williams and John McWhorter. You could add Bill Cosby in there as well. But, unlike Cosby, the men I listed first are "academics" - professors and highly-respected writers who, coincidentally, are black. They would not, in my opinion, prefer to be characterized, conversely, as "black writers" or "black academics." I assume this because of the thesis that runs through most of their writings and studies is, to whit, black society has a problem and that problem is not, principally, external. "We have met the enemy and it is us."

According to these writers and thinkers, black society's principle restraining factor is not white racism. Instead, it is black underachievement and a fatalistic grasp onto the "victimology" lifeboat. In political terms, these men have stepped outside the "party line." Whereas the more conspicuous "black party" members - the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton, film-maker Spike Lee, and others - march to the drumbeat of historical racism and current bigotry, these men have spoken out on "lost opportunities" and "promises unfulfilled." And, taking their sacrilege even a step further, they propose that it is not the white man's boot on the necks of the current blacks, it is the boot of their fellow blacks.

I will continue. soon, I hope, with the analysis of the first of these authors, Shelby Steele. Dr. Steele primarily is a "cultural commentator." The order I will follow after that will have to be a flow for, as of this moment, I am anxious to discuss them all, equally. I think they provide a plethora of ideas that are worthy of examination. I know, at least for me, it will be a rewarding examination.