Black people uproot their families and move into neighborhoods that are not particularly welcoming in an effort to get away from it.  We’ll live in communities that are culturally alienating.  Where the grocery stores do not sell turkey gizzards and the restaurants always burn a steak ordered well done.  In fact, in an effort to get away from crime, black people live where frequently we become the object of suspicion.

And African Americans who can’t just up and move from one neighborhood to another often want to.  But moving is expensive.  Then too, factor in everyday expenses like transportation, childcare, and housing costs.  People do not necessarily get to choose where we live.  Some times we live where we must, due to one reason or another. 

For those who prefer to live in high crime districts do so despite the crime—not because we are comfortable with it.  African Americans want to be able to park our cars at night and find them in tact where we left them the next morning.  Like anyone else on the planet, black people want to be able to catch a breeze through an open window on cool summer nights without wondering if someone is going to creep in to steal or kill.  Black people don’t like crime.

African Americans love our children just like ever other population.  Adults in the neighborhood look out for the kids in our community.  We want the water that we drink to nourish rather than to poison us.  We want our kids to be able to go outside to play without being struck by stray bullets.  We have a strong disdain for predatory behaviors.  We want our kids to be able to walk home after a party without being snatched or hemmed up, just like white parents do. 

African Americans love President Obama because he accomplished the feat of being elected to the highest office in the land and he never embarrassed us.  No drama Obama.  No semen stained blue dresses showed up.  No imaginary weapons of mass destruction.  Not even a private email server.

And he married Michelle—a dark-skinned woman who grew up on the southside of Chicago who can dance.  He is intelligent.  Thoughtful.  Handsome.  And can carry a tune. 

We lined up to vote in record numbers in 2008 to help elect the first black president of the United States.  It was a symbolic victory for a people who were introduced to these shores in chains and whose forced labor helped to build this country even as the nation kept us disenfranchised. 

But we know he ain’t perfect.  He was a wartime president who never accomplished a successful withdrawal from the conflicts in the Middle East.  He seemed utterly incapable of addressing the most pressing problems that plague African Americans like the racism of the prison industrial complex.    He was also termed the Deporter-in-Chief due to his record on immigration matters.  In fact, President Obama had very little positive impact on the daily lives of most African Americans.  

Black people love Jesus.  In fact, while many churches are seeing declining memberships, African American congregations are still growing.  Just visit one on any given Sunday.

Most African Americans don’t actually spend much time studying our history.  While few have read anything written by even our most beloved heroes Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X beyond what is required of them in high school English or history classes, most will tell you that they love Black History. 

It’s the idea that’s really compelling.  The fact is that for many years, teachers told us that we didn’t have a history.  So now we proudly affirm that there is in fact a category identified as BLACK History—and we love it.  And because it’s not actually taught in school, there is no test to measure how much we really know. 

Related to the previous point, Trump supporters should know that while we admire black radicals like Malcolm X or Huey Newton or Bob Moses, almost none of us follow their lead or commit ourselves to their causes.  We don’t buy their books.  We don’t organize.  We don’t go to the shooting range. 

Mostly African Americans want the same kinds of things for us that you want for yourself. 

Our most iconic books are about that struggle:  Souls of Black Folk, Native Son, Invisible Man, The Color Purple, Beloved, Kindred, The Known World, Black Skin White Mask, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual….   And many of our public intellectuals have built careers on the subject.  We study it in schools.  We sing about it in songs like “Fight the Power” and “F- the Police.”  We spend a lot of time pushing against oppression.

Africans arrived in 1619, soon after the founding of Jamestown in 1607.  That means we have been here nearly 400 years.

For better or worse, we are both African and American but the country gives us too much flack—like we shouldn’t be what we are.  The country looks at us and wants us to be somewhere else or something else.   So when it’s time to talk about bad things—like a Wall Street guy humping a statue of a little girl they code him up using black language as a “bro.”  Or when the news wants to talk about bad guys, they show pictures of black men.  Or when politicians say that women are having too many babies that they want other people to take care of they suggests it’s black women in the cities abandoned by black men who won’t work to feed their black children.  And addiction only becomes a health crisis when it moves into suburban Ohio. 

Black people just don’t want to be scapegoated for the country’s problems. 

Even after 400 years, we are astonished by the fact that white folks haven’t gotten used to the fact that we’re all here in this thing together. 

Whatsup with that?