I kid you not. Here's what Morrison, one of America's most renowned Black writers, wrote in a strange little essay in this week's New Yorker:

``African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: White skin notwithstanding, this is our first Black President. Blacker than any actual Black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of Blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. Well, I'll be damned. I never realized that Clinton is ``our first Black President.'' Silly me, I looked athis pinkish skin and simply assumed he was Caucasian. But then, I foolishly thought that race was a matter of genetically inherited pigmentation. Now, a Nobel-certified genius informs me that a White man can be Black if he possesses certain stereotypically downscale lifestyle characteristics.

Naturally, I immediately evaluated myself on the Morrison racial scale. I'm not from Arkansas and I don't play the sax, but I come from a working-class family and I've eaten way too many Big Macs. Does that make me Black, too? Or maybe mulatto? And what about Black folks who were born middle-class, play the cello and eat salad? Are they White? And if Colin Powell is elected president, will he be the second Black president or merely the 43rd White guy in the Oval Office? Of course, this is all completely absurd.

But it does make you wonder: What would happen if a White writer published a piece suggesting that poverty, single parenthood and junk-food eating were uniquely black characteristics? I suspect that AfricanAmericans would be irate and justifiably so. Morrison doesn't stop with her new definition of Blackness. She goes on to compare Ken Starr's tenacious stalking of the President to the tactics some Whites use to punish ambitious Black men: ``The message was clear: `No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. In short, unless you do as we say, your expletives belong to us.' ''

Well, I've heard people claim that prosecutors target Black pols because they're Black, but this is the first time I've ever heard anyone theorise that prosecutors have targeted a White pol because he's Black. As long as we're throwing around goofy theories, let me propose one: This essay is a hoax. No great novelist could possibly write anything this dumb. Some prankster has got hold of Morrison's stationery and somehow tricked The New Yorker into publishing this piffle, perhaps as a wayof satirising intellectuals who view everything -- even the battle between a White President and a White prosecutor -- through the prism of race.

LA Times-Washington Post