You don't call yourself a hyphenated American

 Let's get this straight right off the bat. This only partially applies to any African-American who wants to claim the homeland because their ancestors had no say whatsoever in becoming American property. You wanna walk proud through Birmingham claiming to be Yoruba - brother or sister, you are fucking Yoruba. I mean, you're not really, but exigent circumstances demand that I respect your decision to identify as such as an act of mourning and personal empowerment. I am speaking primarily to my melanin-challenged brothers and sisters:

You are not Italian. You are not German. You are not Scottish. You are not Irish. You are not Indian, Korean, Chinese, or Lao. You don't live in any of those places. You didn't used to live in any of those places. You didn't grow up in any of those places. You don't speak the language. If you do, you don't have the dialect and you don't know the slang. You don't eat the food, because the FDA won't let you have unpasteurized milk or foreign cured meats... You don't pay the taxes and you don't carry the passport. Yes, you have relatives that came from someone else long ago. So does pretty much everyone else in the United States (which is a genocidal topic for another day). Who fucking cares? 

Let me explain this with a personal example. I have a set of great grandparents who immigrated to the United States from Prussia and a set of grandparents who immigrated to the United States from Germany. My friend Ahmed has a set of parents who immigrated to Germany from Turkey. Ahmed was born in Leipzig, raised his kids in Leipzig, goes to mosque in Leipzig, runs a kebab shop in Leipzig, pays his taxes in Leipzig. I am not German. Ahmed is German. Anyone who wants to argue either of those points is a racist. End of story. Don't accidentally be a racist because you are mistaken about who you are proud to be.

Stop pretending to be something you're not. You're American. You are, literally, the very best fucking thing about America. You are fully fucking integrated 4th-5th-6th-7th-8th generation Americans with a culture that is both distinct from the wider American milieu,and uniquely not the culture of the home country. You are the great shining beacon on the hill for multiculturalism. You are a living rebuff to all of the sad European wastoids who think that because first or second generation immigrants don't immediately Frenchify or Spanishify fast enough to not be scary to the homogeneous villagers. You are proof that we can all more or less tolerate each other without an official language (which let's us have Hmong street signs in North Carolina) or an official church (ever seen a mosque next to a cathedral next to a temple? Visit any decent sized US city).

Love your hybrid culture, your terrible mash-up cuisine, your weird pidgen language you speak with your grandparents. Or, you know, be a self-loathing racist shit bag.

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