Picture it: elementary school, sixth grade homeroom, sometime during the 1980’s. I say something to friends that a white male classmate (I’ll call him Tim) disagrees with. The context of the conversation escapes me now, but I will always remember his loud and hostile response: “Well why don’t you move back to Africa then?”

Gasps and silence. “Go ‘back to Africa’?” I repeated. “I haven’t been there yet, number one, and number two, I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. When are you going back to Europe?”

Tim’s mouth fell open, eyes narrowing in a hostile stare and his pale freckled skin flushing to a dark red. Maybe that was the first time someone flipped the script on his ignorance, perhaps, or maybe he just didn’t expect the short African-American girl to assert herself with a logical response.

Anyway, it was the first time I was confronted with that phrase, but certainly not the last, and it was certainly jarring to learn that our 73-year-old president had practically restated the same juvenile remark to four female members of Congress, elected officials [Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York), Ayanna Pressley (Massachusetts), Ilhan Omar (Minnesota) and Rashida Tlaib (Michigan)] who simply were exercising their first amendment rights to disagree with his point of view.

After hearty condemnation from Democrats incredulous questioning from the press, the 45th president—-who once described African countries with an unprintable expletive and, as a private citizen, spent nearly 100,000.00 buying ad space in multiple NY-based newspapers to condemn five young black men found innocent in a highly-publicized rape trial, claimed that “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” Seriously. And with a straight face. Just because someone doesn’t outright disparage someone’s race and ethnicity doesn’t mean they aren’t singling them out in a negative way. And few things are more negative than implying that only a certain group of people have the approval, or ability. to speak out.

Considering that “Make America Great Again,” Trump’s campaign slogan, was a criticism of the United States, it’s disappointing—-yet not surprising—-that a leader who often pays lip service to the nation his grandparents migrated to, feels that others shouldn’t enjoy that same privileges, even fellow officials and citizens. How can anyone, especially a leader of an entire country, claim dissenting opinions as ‘disrespectful’ while insulting them in the process? The height of irony and disingenuousness is demanding, as a non-Native American, that anybody go back anywhere, especially seeing as one group—-my own—-didn’t have a choice in their arrival. Xenophobia and selective memory about one’s origins will never make any country ‘great’: respecting and acknowledging one another’s viewpoints will. And one of the quickest ways to do so is to not silence historically oppressed groups for resisting pressure to acquiesce to ‘the way it is.’

In the 1955 classic, Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin famously said, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” He also once stated, in a quote that resonates deeply now as it did back then, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” If Trump bothered to look, even a cursory glance at this nation’s history toward Africans and their descendants—-slavery, Jim Crow laws, Black Codes, the 3/5ths Compromise, poll taxes and reneging of the “40 acres and a mule” policy, costing generations of wealth and progress—-should remind those wanting us to ‘go back’ that we have worked just as hard, and suffered just as much, if not more, for the freedoms we claim today. One being made uncomfortable by what I say doesn’t mean that I don’t have the right to say it.

If Tim and President Trump don’t want to move forward like the rest of us, where equality is the goal for all instead of a few, then maybe they should take their own advice.