However, law cannot change the hearts of men. Nor can law ensure that a child will grow up to be a responsible adult. In a free society, government does not, and cannot, act as a parent. Government can't ensure that black kids will become nuclear physicists.

The work that blacks need to do in Washington today is to reduce government interference with black individual lives, families and communities to solve our own problems. We need to increase the freedom we have to choose how to educate our children and to increase the control we have over our income and savings.

When black leaders suggest that we need government to do more than ensure our protection, they sound like the very racists who supposedly cause our problems.

It may be news to Farrakhan, and perhaps to other black leaders, that blacks are unique and individual human beings. It's the racists who look at us otherwise. It does not empower black citizens when they hear from their leaders that they are not unique individuals but racial objects.

Am I suggesting that blacks in America today do not have to contend with the burden of racism? Of course I am not. What I do claim is that the most damaging racism in our community is what it hears from its own leaders. It is the message that black citizens cannot and should not be treated as free and personally responsible individuals.

Black problems today are in individual hearts, minds and homes. This is where they need to be solved. The only reason to go to Washington is to get rid of existing barriers to allowing this to happen.