RENOWNED neurosurgeon, Dr Ben Carson, was recently appointed the Trump Administration’s Secretary for Housing and Urban Development.
In his debut speech to his new staff on March 6 2017, Carson shocked his underlings when he said that slaves were nothing more than immigrants.
“That’s what America is about. A land of dreams and opportunity. There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great grandsons, great granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”
The African America community has certainly not been amused by these comments.
Actress-turned-activist, Whoopi Goldberg, said that Carson should ‘read or watch Roots’ as slaves did not voluntarily come to America, but were stolen from the motherland.
Samuel L. Jackson and the NAACP categorically stated that slaves were not immigrants, and in the case of Jackson, he had an extra choice of words for Dr Carson.
The issue of immigrants in America was brought to the fore by President Donald Trump during the election campaign trail, when he promised that he would build a giant wall to keep out Mexicans and that Muslims would be restricted from entering the US.
His message was welcomed by white America, which wrongly believes that the US is bursting at the seams because of ‘immigrants’.
White America, due to some perverted notion of superiority, believes that it owns the US and yet it is responsible for the eradication of native Americans, their culture and history.
The debate surrounding who is an immigrant and who is a native is funny that way in the US.
One of the first lessons children learn about the US has to do with the Mayflower and Thanksgiving.
The Mayflower was the first ship to bring European immigrants who successfully settled in America.
The Pilgrims were early European settlers of the Plymouth Colony, which is in present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts.
The Pilgrims’ leadership came from the religious congregations of Brownist English Dissenters who had fled the volatile political environment in England for the relative calm and tolerance of 16th-17th Century Holland in the Netherlands.
Towering over the New York City is a symbol that stands for an idea. The Statue of Liberty, which stands in Upper New York Bay, is a universal symbol of freedom.
Originally conceived as an emblem of the friendship between the people of France and the US and a sign of their mutual desire for liberty, over the years the statue has become much more.
It has become known as the Mother of Exiles, for it greeted millions of immigrants, embodying hope and opportunity for those seeking a better life in America.
The Statue of Liberty stirred the desire for freedom in people all over the world.
It represents the US itself, a land of dreams and hope.
For decades, the US opened its doors and welcomed with open arms millions of immigrants who all arrived through New York’s Ellis Island in the hope of a better life in America.
The inscription on the Statue of Liberty reads “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free”.
Because America has always presented itself as a nation of immigrants, most citizens have a habit of identifying their ancestry based on the countries in which their families lived before they immigrated to the US.
Which is why you find white Americans identifying themselves as Irish Americans, German Americans, Italian Americans and so forth. According to a 2014 US Census Bureau report, these four groups are the largest self-reported European ancestry in the US, forming 37,8 percent of the total population.
The biggest hypocrite of all in this debate has been its chief agitator, Donald Trump, the son of a Scotswoman.
His mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, was from the Hebridean Island of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland, from where she emigrated to America and met and married Frederick Trump, of German origin. His two wives are immigrants.
Trump’s current wife, Melania, is from Slovenia. His first wife was born in Czechoslovakia.
Maybe this would explain why he wants to build a giant wall, to ensure that he does not fall for another foreign woman.
The current immigration debate in America is purely racist.
Those who are seeking to exclude others from the US (whites), are targeting non-whites (Mexicans, Arabs, blacks).
The Mexicans are accused of being illegal immigrants who take away jobs from the lower classes of whites, and the Arabs are accused of being Muslim terrorists.
Such rhetoric breeds negativity and it has found ground in Middle America which has been culturally lagging behind and traditionally embrace conservative politics.
Middle America has proved to be a boon for Trump as he clearly articulated their racist, narrow-minded view of the world.