If anyone in this country wants to understand the African American experience and take "race" out of the equation then all they need to do is talk to the survivors or read the first hand accounts of what life and death was like inside the Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps in the years immediately preceding and during World War II. The only real difference between the horrors visited upon people of color in this country (and by people of color I am referring to both African Americans and Native Americans) is that the American Holocaust has stretched out over the course of centuries whereas the Nazi Holocaust was compressed to the tune of roughly a dozen years.
These points were driven home to me as a child growing up on the South Shore of Long Island in the 1970's by survivors of those very concentration camps themselves. The one thing I remember most of those horrors was being told in closing "We (Jews) will never forget what happened to us and we will never allow anyone else to forget what happened to us. Nor should you (black people) forget what has happened to you and nor should you allow anyone else to forget what has happened to you."
Unfortunately, far too many of us people of color have allowed others to convince us to forget or at least diminish what has happened to us and as a result what we see happening now in these racsit attacks on President Obama, voter suppression, and the continued lynchings of our young black males like Trayvon Martin, is the very thing those survivors of the Nazi Holocaust warned me about some thirty five and forty years ago and by that I mean history, horrid history, has begun repeating itself.
The adult survivors of those Nazi horrors who's vivid accounts of seeing their family & friends perish in the gas chambers, who heard the dying cries of their fellow human beings being roasted alive in the ovens, and of seeing scores upon scores of men, women, and children, literally being blasted into huge open pits by machine gun fire from SS guards; continues to be the stuff of nightmares for me personally and I am truly sorry that it is no longer the stuff of nightmares for so many today for if you understand what happened in those camps you will better understand what has happened to people to people of color in this country from before the dawning days of the Republic itself.
Just because the horrors that happened here were American made and spread out over the course of centuries rather than compressed in the relatively short span of twelve years does not in any way shape or form mitigate their evil. Torture is torture. Genocide is genocide. Slavery is slavery, and evil is evil; it matters not the nationalities of the perpetrators of these crimes. Any person of color who does not regard the Confederate flag the same way as the Jews regard the Nazi swastika is crazy as hell because such a person is willfully ignorant of our history to the point of being certifiably insane.
Just imagine a Jew parading around carrying a flag with the Nazi swastika on it claiming that that flag is part of his her/heritage too because their forebears were born in Nazi Germany. Think of how utterly loony you would regard such a person and then you can imagine why so many of us African Americans & Native Americans feel such contemptuous contempt for those people of color who so proudly align themselves with the Confederate flag waving GOP and Tea & Libertarian Parties; justifying their madness by saying that because they are Americans and children of the South, that the Confederate flag is a part of their heritage too.
So again take "race" out of the equation if you wish and read the accounts of Ann Frank, and others who experienced first hand the horrors of such hell holes as Dachau and Auschwitz. See the images of the bodies piled high, of the mass graves, and the cremated remains of those burned alive in those ovens. Do that, absorb it, and then you will acquire some understanding of how the vast, vast, majority of African and Native Americans view these United States, and why so many of us will never, ever, allow ourselves to forget, or allow others to forget that holocaust which has dishonored our country and forever stained its soil with innocent blood.
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