TransGriot Note:
This one started as a response in a Think Progress blog thread discussing Tom Tancredo's (R-CO) disengenuos desire to amend the House rules and abolish the Congressional Black Caucus. Several people agreeing with Tancredo used the conservative buzz words 'why can't we hypenated folks be 'just americans?'
Some of you ask the question why we African-Americans can't be 'just Americans?'
Because for 400 years y'all have refused to let us be 'just Americans'.
You brought us here in chains and refused to compensate us for the 246 years of chattel slavery. Every time we sucessfully built up our own neighborhoods, towns, institutions and economies without your help you started race riots on false pretexts and swooped in to burn those very neighborhoods down.
You organized gangs of white-hooded terrorists to invade our neighborhoods and homes and engage in an orgy of lawlessness, rape and murder designed to intimidate, brutalize and 'keep the Blacks down'.
You lynched us by the thousands and called it 'entertainment'. You discriminated against us, jacked with our voting rights and refused to let us participate in making the laws that affect us even though it stated in the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments of the Constitution that you couldn't do that to fellow American citizens.
You have called us 'stupid and ignorant' when it is my people who have created many of the inventions, medical procedures, scientific advances and processes that have enriched this country and improved life for all of us.
You have called us 'lazy' when it is our labor that built Washington D.C., the railroads and much of this country's infrastracture.
You have mocked our beauty and called us 'ugly' even as your women rush to spend thousands of dollars to bake their skin under ultraviolet light and surgically acquire the features that African-American women possess from birth.
You have called us 'Unamerican' even though we have fought and shed our blood in EVERY war this country has been involved in and come home from battle to have the rights and freedoms we fought to extend overseas to others denied to us on American shores.
You have repeatedly denigrated and disrespected my people and my culture even as you secretly admire our creativity and seek to emulate it.
You have never apologized for the centuries of pain and suffering that you have inflicted upon my people, but have the nerve to tell me to 'get over it'. Why can't you humble yourself to say to my people "I'm sorry?'
Why can't we be 'just Americans'? I don't know. Why don't you answer your own question for me?