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- 50 -It is utterly elemental but entirely appropriate to mention what needs to be said, the oppressed African in theUnited States it appears is quite content with becoming an oppressor. And it is also comprehensible andinevitable that this decision will come at a price.The election of Barack Obama places the African in the U.S. in an additional precarious position. Should theObama administration carry on the programme of U.S. global-wide imperialism, soft intellectual colonialmaintenance at home and discriminatory disregard for international law, American Africans can nowlegitimately be accorded the very same ethical animosity White Americans have earned for themselves on thegrounds that they have made a cognizant decision to stand with the U.S. even when it has done and will dowrong to them and the rest of the world.The 2008 election round is verification of this attitude as are the numerous negative social ebbs that havedeveloped within the African community once we began to forget who we really are and how we came to bein the United States of America. The sense of shared culture, struggle and survival fluently expressed in JohnGriffin’s outstanding expose’ of White America, “Black like Me” is no longer a universal contemplation ofour people. It was first beaten out of us by the slave master and the overseer with the lash, now we chooseto beat it out of ourselves with hair relaxers, gold jewellry and the promise of material riches. The deeplypainful articulations of Jazz and Blues have been remade as products of “America,” not the undeviatingdiscipline of the African musical traditions brought to the Americas encased within the DNA of the slave. Justas the political quilt of the United States is surreptitiously based on a much earlier model of North AmericanAboriginal state relations, America’ much-admired cultural melange and civil freedoms owes its existence toits ethnic and social minorities, not the Europocentric social order. But Euro-America has made a bad habitof co-opting all it conquers as its own invention. As noted by author Fredrick W. Turner in 1974:“The truth is that in describing the Indian and his lands the White man was describing himself, hisown drives and consuming desires.”The urge to covet anything, everything and everyone in sight is the trademark of the settler mentality and hasbeen in the Americas since European invasion first began. The practise of savage cruelty motorised by pureunadulterated greed, codified by religious zeal and Euro-nationalism may have changed in form, but theessential functions of Euro-American rule remain exactly the same.