If we’ve learned anything from the Michael Richards affair, it’s that some black folks will use any opportunity to play the Katrina card.

Richards is the notably unfunny comedian who had to resort to using the N-word and dredging up lynching when a couple of black folks heckled him in a Los Angeles nightclub. Richards has since been all apologies, telling the good reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson that he’s no racist and how sorry he is.

(If he’s really sincere, Richards should do his “nigger/lynching” rant in front of an audience comprised of a few Bloods, a few Crips and a mess of ticked-off black Muslims. Then he can issue his apology from his bed on the intensive care unit.)

Of course, Newsweek magazine weighed in on the matter. Noted Newsweek writer Ellis Cose did a piece, as did a younger black staffer named Raina Kelley. It was Kelley who played the Katrina card -- as in Hurricane Katrina.

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Kelley started out comparing Richards’ bigoted comments to those that Mel Gibson made about Jews and the one soon-to-be former Sen. George Allen of Virginia made about an Indian American. Kelley added in that ad used against Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee during the election for good measure.

For Kelley, you see, all the bigotry comes from folks who are either known conservatives or Republicans. If she wanted an example of anti-Semitism, she could have cited the remarks that soon-to-be former Rep. Cynthia McKinney’s father made after she lost in 2002. McKinney’s dad blamed her defeat on Jews. He even spelled out “J-E-W-S” for those who may not have been clear.

That same year, we had black New York City councilman Charles Barron telling people at the Millions for Reparations Rally that he’d like to slap a white person for his mental health.

Or perhaps Kelley could have mentioned the race-baiting tactics black Democrats have used lately. Last year, we had New York Rep. Charles Rangel calling President Bush “our Bull Connor” for the federal government’s lame response in helping victims of Hurricane Katrina (Rangel has since made it clear what he really feels about po’ black folks in the South. “Who wants to live in Mississippi?” the good congressman recently asked.).

Then we had Georgia Rep. John Lewis, former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young and current Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin playing the Bull Connor card again, implying in an ad about a Republican candidate for the Fulton County commission that his election would return black folks to the days when fire hoses and police dogs were used on black demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama.

But clearly Kelley believes that only certain people have cornered the market on bigotry and race-baiting. That’s her perogative, as is her comment that “if we’re going to talk about race, let’s talk about the victims of Hurricane Katrina or poverty.”

Much as I’m uncomfortable with the notion that only black folks are poor, let’s talk about those things a second, shall we?

Author Juan Williams quoted several people about race and Katrina in his book “Enough.” One was Sen. Barack Obama: “The incompetence (by the federal government in helping Katrina’s victims) was colorblind.”

Another was former Louisiana senator John Breaux, a Democrat: “The two parishes south of New Orleans … are mostly white. They are devastated, and they arguably got a lot less attention than New Orleans.”

But Kelley may have had a valid point when she wrote, “if we want to condemn Michael Richards, why not have a go at his opener: ‘Fifty years ago they’d have you upside down with a (expletive) fork up you’re a--.’ Let’s be shocked that he referred to a time when black people were hanged from trees or burned for crimes outside of the due process of the law and sometimes for reasons so slight that there might as well have been none.”

Well, she would have a valid point, except that people were shocked. That’s what made Richards’ comments news. Here’s what doesn't shock us, but should.

“In the year 2005, more black folks were killed by other black folks than have ever been lynched in this country.” That’s a statement USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham made to one of his classes at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University recently.

From 1882 to 1968, according to the Archives at Tuskegee Institute, 3,446 blacks were lynched. In 2005 -- the same year Hurricane Katrina hit -- 7,125 blacks were murdered, according to FBI statistics.

3,000 blacks were murdered by other blacks in a category in which there was one murder victim and one offender. Many others probably died like Bryan Jones, Said Sawab and Nicole Edmonds of Baltimore.

Jones, Sawab and Edmonds were killed in Baltimore this year. Two people have been charged with killing Jones, three with killing Sawab and two with killing Edmonds.

All those accused in those killings are black juveniles.

The number of blacks who committed murder in 2005 is well over 6,000. Do the math: add the 3,000 blacks killed by one black person to the number killed by two or more black persons, and you have a figure that dwarfs the 3,446 blacks lynched since 1882.

Why aren’t we as mad about that as we are about Michael Richards?