Oh, my people, there was something terribly wrong with this picture.

I was at home channel surfing on a warm Saturday afternoon in early August, just counting the days until both the college and pro football seasons started. I stumbled on station WGN out of Chicago, where it looked like some black folks were having a parade.

It was the “75th Annual Bud Billiken Parade and Picnic,” it turned out, sponsored by the folks at the Chicago Defender newspaper. Memo to the Defender staff: next year, get some announcers who have a clue.

I didn’t catch the names of the folks doing the announcing for the most recent Bud Billiken parade, probably because I had to pick myself up off the floor after what they said.

Some girls — and I’m talking pre-teens, not teens — were doing a particular dance. The announcers called it, without the slightest trace of shame, the “chickenhead dance.” They said it like it was a good thing.

“My God!” I gasped. “Don’t these people know what a chickenhead is?”

How exactly do I put this? The best I can do is scroll back in my memory banks to about eight years ago, when a dear friend of mine — a novice reporter — told me of her experience on a ride-along with some Los Angeles Police Department patrol officers. They were on a routine vice watch, looking for prostitutes and their johns. That’s when she learned that a “chickenhead” was a prostitute who specialized in a particular sexual act that ain’t even gonna be described in this column.

But if you’re capable of reading this far, you’re capable of reading between the lines. Now you know what a chickenhead is.

Of course, black folks’ newest spokesmen — our rap artists — have chosen to update the term and make it not as opprobrious as it is. Now it’s kind of a synonym for the groupies that male rappers have come to feel are part of the territory. Once again, like they have with “thug” and “pimp” and “gangsta” and “player,” male rappers have taken something negative and applied it as something really not so bad to women, much as those other terms are applied to young black men.

But really, how many of you with pre-teen or teen-aged daughters would want them to be called “chickenheads” — in either the classic use of the term or the rappers’ use of the term? Can I see by a show of hands how many of you want your daughters, granddaughters, nieces or cousins shaking their little fannies to something called “the chickenhead dance”?

My two granddaughters will be 16 in another dozen years. Trust me, I’ll paddle their bottoms — I’ll have to stand in line behind their parents, of course — if I ever catch them doing something called “the chickenhead dance.”

And if I ever hear a guy call either of them a chickenhead, I’ll muster all the strength in what will then be my 64-year-old body to break both his kneecaps.

This chickenhead thing is a new low, even for guy rappers, who are notorious for having no cut card. As if trying to make being a chickenhead not a big deal weren’t enough, have you checked out what rapper Young Buck said about Halle Berry on his “Let Me In” single?

“The reason Eric Benet can’t stand me,” this bloated fop raps, “is because I know money will make Halle Berry come out them panties.”

Excuse me? I don’t know Ms. Berry — that’s what she is to you, Young Buck — but I know she’s an extraordinarily talented actress who didn’t deserve that. She doesn’t need Young Buck or his money either. Just how much can these rappers disrespect black women and get away with it? And for how long?

And it’s not just the rappers. When Amiri Baraka, the black poet, playwright and essayist came to Baltimore last year and called National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice a “skeeza” — which puts her just a notch above chickenhead on the morality scale — I called him on it, over the protests of a lot of black folks who thought it was OK. I tried explaining to them I would have protested no matter what black woman Baraka called a “skeeza.”

You can disagree with Rice’s politics all you want, but, when it comes to our women, some lines should never be crossed.

And I don't care what their politics are