Over 400 years of chattel slavery, mob lynching, legal and social discrimination, economic disempowerment, disproportionate treatment from the judicial system, and a blatant lack of protection under the constitution of the United States of America has incredibly, still failed to teach some members of the African American community to respect the principle of equality in treatment of individuals that they know absolutely nothing about except for the color of their skin. This is beyond my capacity to understand. I reject the argument I hear that this isn’t prejudice because of the analogy that “a slave is justified in hating his master”. If saying that someone is your “master” by simply being “white”, and that it is justified, then why isn’t it justified that a white hate a “black” because by being black, the white doesn’t want to share accommodations with the “help”?

In Daytona Beach, a New Hampshire man has filed suit against a Daytona Beach motel owner who refused to book him in a room close to a Black College Reunion because he is white. What was the owner’s reason? Well, black folks don’t want to be that close to white folks. More specifically, the African-Americans attending the reunion didn’t want whites there at the same time.

I am at a total loss that any African-American that understands their “struggle” could be prejudice towards anyone because of the color of their skin. If this group has not learned the principle from their hundreds of years of anemic portions of the American Dream they were allowed to enjoy, if they haven’t learned the lesson of the evils of discriminations then it can’t be learned by anyone.

America will never be all that it can be as long as we are a fractured nation. We will never realize all that we are until we no longer see ourselves as anything other than American. The ugly fact is that this is the land of assimilation. That is how you become “American”. You might come from this place or that place, but once you are here, given a single generation removed from the old country, you are now one of ours. Even African Americans fortunate enough to afford a trip to Africa return from Africa some 200 generations removed from that culture, lifestyle, and economic reality and reluctantly admit that they are more American than African now. Only through the study of American History can we teach our younger generation that the facts are that we are so mixed together in this nation, racially, socially, and culturally despite the variety in our complex social complexion, as well as a historical need to segregate ourselves from one another, that no one on the earth can understand the identity crisis within us but ourselves.