I know a lot of Whites will say for us to go back to Africa , but we did not bring ourselves here.

"We ain't gonna give this country away after we built it." As Michael Harriot answers one of the questions he's asked most often,

Why on earth should they? They were born here; their parents, grandparents, etc., and back six, seven eight generations were born here. That’s far further back than most white Americans who never question their right to be live in the United States can trace their residency in this country, by a long shot. In other words, if you can’t trace your ancestry back to at least 1700, you probably shouldn’t even raise this question, on that grounds alone. But then, that’s just a starting point.

Then there is the fact that if we suggest that they should return to the countries from whence the came, shouldn’t the rest of us? If not, why not? Indeed, if anything, arguably they have more right to remain here, if they choose, than we do. They were brought here against their will. We opted to come here and, in the process, deprived the people already living on the land we appropriated of their own territory, pushing them off into other areas. We systematically depopulated large swathes of the country once inhabited by aboriginal peoples and still don’t recognize their rights. Perhaps the descendants of someone brought against his/her will from a part of Africa that today they probably couldn’t identify with any certainty beyond saying it was somewhere within a several hundred miles’ radius of a swathe of the west coast have more right to remain in the United States than do the relatively privileged descendants of German, Norwegian, English, etc. farmers and Scottish merchants in my own family ancestry? Even others who fled famine in Ireland and persecution in Russia and Poland, came here voluntarily and not as slaves, and their ancestors rose to number themselves among the country’s elite in a way that descendants of slaves haven’t been able to do. (Thanks, Jim Crow.)

Then, too, many aren’t just descendants of slaves, but of their “American/European” masters. So why emphasize their African heritage and decide that only that counts? Oh yes, the racist “one drop” argument…

Now, let’s look at this from the other side(s). There have been times when African -Americans have explored a return to Africa. Back in 1816, slaveholders in the south backed the American Colonization Society (gosh, a racist echo in the room, here!) as a way to get rid of pesky free blacks in the south, in case they infected the slaves with a desire for freedom. Politicians were kind of keen on the idea too, as they didn’t want blacks voting. They began sending free blacks to what is today Liberia in 1822, and the country became Liberia in 1847. The problem, which would still be a problem today? Well, the “relocated” African-Americans had nothing in common at all with the local Africans and had no interest in fitting in. They didn’t know the culture, the local languages, the animist religion. They created a state that excluded the local community that had been there before them (ha, a parallel to the white Europeans landing on Plymouth Rock!!), putting in power an Americo-Liberian elite that endured well into the 20th century. Still, people like Lincoln preferred the Liberia option to emancipation very, very late into the game as less disruptive. Of course, it was disruptive for the African Americans who had lived in America for generations and weren’t going anywhere they recognized as “home”; and it was certainly disruptive for the Africans.

And if anything like that happened today, as others have pointed out, you’d end up with a similar result. In the 1960s, for instance, in the midst of the civil rights era and decolonization in Africa, a number of African Americans went to Africa to explore, to visit and some to stay, for various lengths of time. It’s the era that spawned Alex Haley’s “Roots”, for instance. But while many I’ve talked to found it fascinating, most also said it reminded them that they are African-American and not African. Their social traditions are different, their political history and historical experience is different. Languages and food are different. As others have noted, African states are already fragmented, rarely reflecting tribal lines, and “descendants of African slaves” as you call them, or American citizens, as I prefer to call them, rarely have more than a vague idea of where their family originated. In a society in which tribal identity matters, this is fairly significant.

After 200 years, I don’t get to just pitch up in Ireland, saying hey, I’m back! Even the descendants of those driven off the land during the Great Famine in the 1840s can’t do that. Who are we to demand that any African state accommodate tens of thousands or millions of African-American citizens, forcibly abducted by our ancestors and exploited by our forbears, because we can’t seem to find a way to cope with a problem that we created in the first place?

It’s not up to the African-American community to go anywhere or do anything except what any other citizen of this country does. It’s our responsibility to ensure that they have opportunities that ensure that the cycle of poverty that slavery, followed by a century of Jim Crow laws and discrimination, created, is finally broken. I don’t have the energy to run through those statistics for you right now — you can do that work for yourself — but all you have to do is look at the K-12 education system and its funding to find a prima facie example of the disastrous way in which this is self-reinforcing. Outsourcing our problems to Africa just adds to the despicable nature of this.