“Do you think he has an attitude?” asked the pigtailed young lady in the third-grade class. She was speaking of the president, George W. Bush. That was the kindest of the questions the students peppered me with on a recent visit to P.S. 305. “Do you think he’s crazy?” “Do you think he’s stupid?” “Do you think he’s a cowboy?” It seemed that these third-graders were trying to reconcile what they have been taught about this country with the actions of the current leadership.

The myth perpetuated is that President Bush wears the cowboy’s mantle of the American West. A land of men with true grit and souls of gold. Maybe a little quick on the draw and with too much swagger, but the kind of guys you’d want on your side of the circled wagon. Appearing on Meet the Press, Vice President Dick Cheney said the cowboy is exactly what’s needed at a time like this, a straight shooter coming to clean up the town.

But the cowboy ethic isn’t what’s driving American foreign policy today. This leadership is coming from a darker place. What is coming to the forefront is what Native American people have known since 1492, and what African people have been pointing out since being captured and brought here. “That’s that white boy. He does anything he wants.” And now he’s doing it on the world stage and people around the world are outraged at the arrogance and the little regard for human life.

But this is not untypical behavior at all. As Professor William Mackey’s beloved grandmother Harriet Westone often said on occasions when white folks would do something particularly repulsive, “Lord, these young Bukra ain’t got no shame.”

Now this shameless behavior is terrorizing people around the world, and while that has not been a problem in the past, now people around the world can terrorize us. As a result, people use sentences that include phrases like, “a nuclear distance from New York,” “biological attacks,” “they’re picking up Pakistanis,” or “Attorney General John Ashcroft.”

With Armageddon, a fascist state, or at least a sudden change of lifestyle at the front door, there still may be time to look at “the Bukra” energy before it’s too late. Of course there have been warnings. African-Americans have been complaining for years that there is something peculiar about this republic. In the last presidential election, when tens of thousands of African-American voters were disenfranchised in Florida without a national uproar, the die was cast. Now that the danger involves automatic weapons on Fifth Avenue and survival scenarios, we are seeing the fervor that should have come out in 2000, upholding the sacredness of the right to vote.

We can find many wonderful ingredients in the American melting pot, but to help understand the kind of people who have re-captured the power to run this country and to fully grasp the danger the world is in, we have to look under a uniquely American rock, chattel slavery.

We’ve featured many articles about slavery, its boost to the American economy and the effects on African-Americans, but never much about the master other than the brutality. While slavery is portrayed as the South’s “peculiar institution,” peculiar also and little-spoken of, were the masters of chattel slaves. After all, these are the people who elected the presidents and provided the economic engine that built this country and charted its course. These are the people it once took a civil war to get rid of.

In his 1934 masterwork, “Black Reconstruction, 1860-1880,” legendary historian W.E.B. DuBois tells us about this class of men and how they view the world. Though he wrote in 1934, we can see that the current administration’s budget of tax cuts for the rich and less and less money for schools, libraries and health care, would win nods of approval from the planters of the mid-1800s. And to have come to power by taking votes away from Black people would be an added surprise that the old ways still work best.

We hope by shedding light on the nastier side of the American character, we can get a better understanding of the kind of people wielding presidential power in the United States today and ask how we will adjust their attitude before they leave the vast majority of Americans poor, sick, ignorant, and like the rest of world, scared.