We African-Americans have been living with people who have hated and despised us since the day we were first taken from our homelands and carted off to the plantation. The White Citizens Council, the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, the Supreme Court and many others have taken venomous swipes at our inherent rights. We've been kept out of neighborhoods, voting booths, country clubs and educational institutions because of our skin. No one person had to do something wrong in order for us all to be vilified and hated.

African-Americans know how to live with hatred. We've been stopped for walking in the wrong neighborhood, lynched for looking up the wrong skirt. We never liked the mistreatment, but we never gave up the dream, either. We know in our hearts that all people are equal and essentially good. We hold that goal to our breasts and move ahead without hesitation. Let's keep that up during this crisis. Our backs are strong enough to bear up under the weight of the hate people have for us. And let's critique the fainthearted other Americans who feel they can't bear living in a world where they are despised.

The problems the world faces today cannot be solved by superior strength alone. We Americans must use our hearts if we want to face the hatred confronting us. And we must be able to look critically at our own actions and motivations if we want to understand our enemies.

This kind of empathy comes hard for most Americans, because we have such a fuzzy understanding of our own history. Our past has always been depicted by images of upstanding white men conquering nature and "heathen foes." From the so-called primitive red man to Adolf Hitler, we've always seen ourselves as standing strong against the enemies of freedom and modernity. Sometimes our cause has been just, and often it has not. But never has an American campaign been so complex. Today we need more than John Wayne and the Winchester rifle. Today we need the subtle compassion of Black America, with its fine-honed attention to the etiquette of liberation.

Our collective freedom, fellow Americans, depends on our ability to defend the rights of others. All Americans should understand this concept, but I fear that it might only be Black America that has the historical perspective to move this notion from an idea into action. We, of all Americans, know what it's like to lose everything in order to come into alignment with the American Dream. Not only do we have a moral stake in protecting the innocent victims of the present war against terrorism, but we stand to profit, spiritually, from the process of working for peace.

Some of the greatest ambassadors representing American culture in the twentieth century have been black people. Louis Armstrong, Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr., Josephine Baker and many others have gone abroad, with or without our government's blessings, to show the world the beauty they have found here. They were men and women of peace. For more than a century, African-Americans have represented America's culture and its high moral ideals, not its penchant for economic domination. While the American government was selling arms to the world, we were delivering jazz. While US Presidents waged war on foreign ideals, African-Americans spoke of peace.

Today is just a continuation of that history. We have to get out there and work for peace. We have to reject the fearmongers and the profiteers. Certainly, we have to protect America. Certainly, we have to arrest and monitor those who have made it their express desire to harm our nation. But we must also remember that there will be no defense if the whole world hates us.

We must remember, the only true defense is peace.

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