“In America if you have one drop of black blood you are black
In Cuba if you have one drop of white blood you are white”
Dr. Digna Castaneda, University of Havana, Cuba

As I reflect on my travels in the world and my life as an African American I am constantly reminded of the rigid role race plays in human affairs. In Brazil and the Dominican Republic I was told that I’m white, in Cape town I’m colored, in Cuba and Puerto Rico I’m mulatto, in Mexico I’m moreno or mestizo and in the U.S.A. I am proudly Black.
Race is not applied scientifically by societies but subjectively in order to maintain invidious social stratification and racial discrimination, with the darkest complexion at the bottom. I agree with Princeton professor and African-American activist, Cornel West, that Race Matters and I contend that in the world and at home race rules.
America is for me a lesson in coping with the crisis of color. Seattle, Washington was relatively serene in the maelstrom of civil strife and violence that characterized the Civil Rights Era of the sixties. However, even we in the far Northwest were impelled to struggle against the pernicious phenomenon of white skin privilege, class privilege and de facto “segregation with a smile.”
For one glorious decade in the sixties black America and progressive white America united in the struggle to defeat racial segregation and discrimination in the South. We defeated de jure segregation but have so far been stymied by de facto segregation ie. the resegregation of American society into black, brown and white.
Blacks, browns and whites still remain largely segregated in the USA today. Martin Luther King’s astute observation that the most segregated time in America is on Sunday morning, the time when people attend church is still true today.
De facto segregation is fueled by the growing economic divide between people of color and Anglo-America. The growing unequal distribution of economic opportunity between blacks, browns and whites is rooted in America’s ignoble history of genocide, slavery, Manifest Destiny, Jim Crow law and racially restrictive covenants.
Law & Order America has systematically incarcerated a generation of black and brown youth without a ripple of reaction from the body politic. Ironically, many African Americans lionize the one who put more blacks in prison than any previous president, Bill Clinton.
Notwithstanding the victories we have won in the Civil Rights struggle, socio-economic reality compels us to concede that we have a long way to go in alleviating the lingering legacy of racism in our society. If we fail to remedy the social evil of racism that festers like a sore in the womb of America the venom will spread and eventually destroy the body politic.
We as individuals and as a people descended from a common mother on Africa’s Serengeti Plain must commit ourselves to abolish racial discrimination in all its insidious forms. We must convince the people and our political leaders that by curing the cancer of racism in America and the world we can achieve social and economic justice for all. Only then, as Langston Hughes said, can America be America again.

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)