Some black folks just can’t leave the “blacker-than-thou” thing alone. Not even when the discussion is about football.

John Smallwood, a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, picked up on that in radio talk show discussions black folks in Philadelphia were having about Donovan McNabb and Terrell Owens.

A quick primer for the non-football fans among you: McNabb is the quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles. Owens was a wide receiver whose mouth quickly made him persona non grata with Eagles coaches, management and McNabb.

Enter Jerry Mondesire, the head of the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP and publisher of the Philadelphia Sun. In a recent column, Mondesire accused McNabb of playing the race card by saying “everybody expects black quarterbacks to scramble.” Mondesire added that the scrambling McNabb was a far better quarterback than the McNabb who stayed in the pocket and passed.

It’s hard to call Mondesire wrong in his assessment. McNabb is best when he scrambles, moves and makes big plays. The golden arm he ain’t. Standing back in the pocket and delivering accurate passes are not McNabb’s strong points.
 
I’m not sure Mondesire intended for his remarks to degenerate into a debate about how “black” McNabb is, but that’s what Smallwood said he heard in those radio discussions.
 
“Debating Donovan McNabb as a true black man is exactly what a good number of African-Americans in Philadelphia are doing since the Owens-McNabb flap became the focal point of the Eagles’ demise,” Smallwood wrote in his own column. “It’s fascinating that this has spiraled way beyond the confines of a football debate. And don’t tell me it hasn’t, when terms such as sellout, token, company man, Uncle Tom and other racially charged ones have been thrown into the debate.”
 
So, there it is: those darned "blacker-than-thou" Negroes have struck again. And this time their target is one of the premier black quarterbacks in the National Football League.

It would be nice if they could confine their remarks, as Mondesire did, to McNabb’s performance on the field. But that would mean they would actually have to be football fans. It would mean they would have to know what they’re talking about. And they don’t know anything, except how to be blacker than some other black person.

This "blacker-than-thou" thing has been around for a while -- at least since the 1960s, when Malcolm X mastered it. Part of Malcolm’s regular spiel was calling black civil rights leaders Uncle Toms, questioning their racial loyalty and sneering at their perceived lack of “blackness.”

The problem was Malcolm should have known better. Among his targets were A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King, Jr. Wilkins was executive secretary of the NAACP in the 1960s. During the 1930s -- when Malcolm admitted he was “cooning” watermelons with little white boys -- Wilkins disguised himself as a sharecropper to investigate lynchings in the South.

When Malcolm was still in diapers, the federal government was branding a newsletter called The Messenger “the most dangerous of all Negro publications.” Randolph published The Messenger with another black man named Chandler Owen.

King never left a black woman standing in the middle of the dance floor to go chasing after a white woman, which Malcolm admitted doing in his self-serving, overrated autobiography.
 
Neither Wilkins, Randolph nor King ever made the revealing psychological slip “I hate every drop of black blood -- oops, I mean white blood -- in me.” Malcolm did. And on more than one occasion.
 
It’s clear Malcolm -- who chided those blacks who hated themselves -- had some self-hatred issues of his own. His ideological descendants -- today’s “blacker-than-thou” Negroes -- have some as well.
 
How else can we explain their constant obsession with who’s black and who isn’t? How else do we explain their vitriolic abuse of conservative blacks like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to mention only two?
 
“Get that n***ger off the Supreme Court!” one prominent black newspaper’s headline hissed about Thomas a few years ago, proving that blacker-than-thou Negroes sometimes find their way into prominent positions. Thomas’ conservative politics, I suppose, inspired the headline.

Have you ever heard of a newspaper geared to Italian-Americans with a headline reading “Get that w*p off the Supreme Court!” in reference to Justice Antonin Scalia?
 
Of course you haven’t. That’s because Italian-Americans realize they come in all political stripes. Some are liberal. Some are conservative. And some are in between. But they’re all still Italian-Americans.

That’s a sign of an ethnic group that loves itself. It’s clear some of us still don’t love us.

And those "blacker-than-thou" Negroes love us least of all.