1. Sometimes, around the coffee maker or what-have-you, you can tell a joke taken from some old TV show back in the '80s and half the people around you won't get it.
   
   
2. You could talk about some Bugs Bunny cartoon you liked as a kid and, again, folks be looking at you wondering who Elmer Fudd was.
   
   
3. A lot of folks who come over here to America has been told by the US State Department, when they getting they refugee visas or whatever, to stay away from American Black folks because we are all criminals and drug addicts or worse. I know this for a fact. Dudes at work have told me as much.
   
   
4. A lot of folks in this country now can't read that New York Times article I mentioned at the start of this article 'cause they are functionally illiterate.

But that's not to diss any of my foreign-born cousins. Hell, it's been true for almost 25 years in this country that most Americans can't read they way out of a paper bag. Our educational system sucks. And where do they send most of the new immigrants from Guatemala, or China, or Haiti: the worst schools we got. So fat chance if they add to the "national capital" of literate folks.

Naw, just look at most stuff on this here Web. "i think u need to shutt up yo!"

I'll give you another example, Homeboys and -girls. The first time I heard Rod Amis, our publisher --- before I even knew the dude --- he was giving an interview on KCBS radio in San Francisco. It was when George Bush was running for President against Michael Dukakis. (Not the George Bush we got now, his Daddy.) Anyway, Rod was arguin' then that lots more people won't be voting in this country 'cause they can't read. He was sayin' that the embarassment and stuff would be too much and that folks would just decide not to go through the hassle.

Hello! I was about to fall off my chair when I heard that! Here was somebody they had put on the radio talking about stuff I knew to be true! He even said something along the lines of "and look at the influx of people who have English as their second language..." I thought, "Yes, sir!"

Brother threw in a lot of big words like "demographics" and such and went so far as to say that some people might have an interest in seein' the "dumbing down" of America as a way of staying in power.

That one night, listening to talk radio, gave me a lot of stuff to think about.

If you lived in California back then, you could see with your own eyes that immigrants was rushing into this country, one way or the other, legal or illegal, and changing the face of the streets.

You could also see that white folks was getting nervous about it and doing everything they could think of, from laws, to jail, to Pat Buchanan's fence between us and Mexico to keep things on what they considered an even keel.

But so was some of the Black political leaders, like your Jesse Jackson's, so they could keep what they considered their piece of the pie. Their clout.

And the weird thang was, from my point of view, it took a very brave person to say, "Hey, ya'll, this country ain't some God-given right of anybody's; we stole it from the Indians!"

(Well, I guess that ain't completely right. The folks at AIM was talking, but that was about it.)

And that's the thing I would like to see most people cop to: America has always been a country of refugees, convicts from other countries, "illegal" folks sneaking their way in after they had nowhere else to run, and some folks that came here against their will. It ain't like *anybody* has a right to be too high-falutin', I'm thinking.

I look at them folks back out around Massachusetts and such who make a Big Deal about comin' over on the Mayflower and I thinks to myself: my peoples most likely got here ten years before ya'll. You see us tryin' to make a big deal about it? You came over here because people in your country didn't even like your ass. We came because we was kidnapped to do the work for ya'll. We built your agricultural base, that started this country, then went on to build your textile industry, your railroads and factories. Who's got the better right to claim "ownership" here?

Be that as it may, whenever I hear or see "anti-immigrant" stuff on TV or in the newspapers, I just get mad.

This is old garbage. It was done to the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, the Poles, you name it. WHEN ARE WE GONNAH GET SMART ENOUGH TO STOP?

Let's just say for a second that there is some kind of cosmic plan out there, that we do have souls and that what we do has consequences. Well, if you accept that, you gottah accept that building up a lot of hatred and discrimination against other folks, basically scapegoating and victimizin' them, can't but bring down a lot of bad stuff on you eventually. Maybe that's what some of them foreigners mean when they refer to us as the Great Satan.

It's certainly something to think about.

The way I see it, hating or looking down on somebody else, for whatever reason, don't make you any more superior, certainly don't give you any superhuman abilities, and I can't see how you would think it profits you one bit.

I say it's time we look around us and see the real America and respond to that, not some fake world they made up for TV. Peace out.

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