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Musician, Educator, Black, Graduate, Brother, Son, Christian, African-American, Proud, Man... on the subject, a friend reciently asked the question on facebook 'If we are free, why do we still live in captivity?'I believe that we as a people are still trapped in captivity because we were released on a mental choker. For 102 years (from the Emancipation Proclamation to The Civil Rights Act of 1964) we were not viewed as equal. A constant effort to assassinate the lives and characters of our leaders has been in effect since the Willie Lynch letter ( http://thetalkingdrum.com/wil.html ) was disseminated. Once the teacher Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, we have left ourselves leaderless. Once we let popular culture run our lives, we have left ourselves fatherless. Now we look to media to see what a black man is. Currently, BET and 95.7 Jamz (‘our’ stations) say that a black man belongs in the trap. A trap is a device or tactic intended to harm, capture, detect, or inconvenience an intruder. Traps may be physical objects, such as cages or snares, or metaphorical concepts ( Wikipedia free dictionary). Although we are not originally from this land, and certainly didn’t ask to come, I feel that we are viewed upon as intruders, and are worthy of inconvenience. It appears that T. I. King of the South can’t spell music, but he can definitely spell TRAP.