“America is in trouble, and a lot of that trouble– perhaps most of it– has to do with race.”

| Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

This is between you and me, us and them, us four and any more who want to join us.  Pick a side and put up your dukes!  Take your best shot!  Let’s see what you’ve got.

Let’s get it out and in the open.  Let’s say what we mean and how we really feel about each other.  Let’s fight hard and long.  Let’s raise our voices and invite others to sing along.  Let the shouting match commence.

Let’s go back and forth about who’s good and who’s bad, who’s in and who’s out, who should be first in line and who wins every time.  There are no boundaries and no comment will be considered out of line.  Speak freely and over each other.  Don’t beat around the bush.  No fig leaves, there is nothing to hide here.

Come out swinging.  Let’s fight all night until the morning.  Let’s come up with everything that is wrong with each other.  Let’s fight with no breaks, no naps and no excuses.  Let’s fight like we mean it and hold nothing back.  Let’s fight without an end in sight about the beginning.  Let’s fight about how we met and how you never got my name.

We never got off on the right foot.  John Rolfe saw “twenty Negroes.”  But, I saw next of kin.  They called them animals; I call them people.  Slave is not a pet name.

And they were kidnapped before race was invented.  This was made up as they went along.  Race didn’t make you do it though as time went on, we claimed that race introduced us.  But, race didn’t pick a fight because it wasn’t even there.  So leave race out of it.

Bootstrap or slaver’s lash, how did America become so great?   We never got our story straight.  Rope around their necks, this was not a match made in heaven.  And so they fought like hell.  They were not happy to be enslaved or to be far away from their homeland.  That is a lie and repeating it constitutes fighting words.

So let’s fight every dotted i and every crossed t, about everything and over anything.  Let’s fight tooth and nail over every physical feature, every scrap of land and sea, who’s right for the world and whose wrong innately.  Because it was only made for one “race” of people, right?

Let’s fight ’til the end and to the death of our consciences.  Just do me one favor.  Leave race out of it.  Because I have heard it said on many occasions, that if we no longer had race, we would find something else to fight about.  So, what is the fighting, the endless duel of cultures really about?

Answer this and I think it will take the fight out of us.  Because it is not about flesh or its hues.  But of course, you might want to fight me about the answer to this too.