Response to "Never African Again" (pg.63)

I love the way Gerald Early conveys the inconspicuous double standard that black people have when it comes to us being black, African-American, just American, just African, etc...
My interpretation of the essay as a whole is that Early was trying to make the reader take notice of an issue that she/he may be battling. The issue of being black in a white oriented society, while trying to prove to other Americans that we are just as American as they are, while at the same time trying to reserve the inner African in us that supposedly is more than the sum of our parts. He goes through the process of African people becoming blacks while trying to get back to the mother land, but when America is so convenient and readily at the forefront, the black then tries to adjust to the New World. Instead of being a counterculture to the white society, the new found "black" disingrates, but at the same time integrates and makes itself a subculture. No more are we fighting to get our lives back, but now our fighting is to improve our living conditions in a new home. Early goes on to outline the "Black's" fight to prove to society (a mere man made social structure) that he is WORTHY of the very soil that his own ancestors died cultivating. Gone is the fight to find out what really happened to us as a people, now it has been replaced with the configuration of out how can we become a better defined replication of the people looking down on us. Only when we feel defeated or oppressed do we try to connect to our African-American roots, as if the order of African life began with American enslavement. I think Early was tyring to get us to see that we do not have to fight to be something that we already are. All of the sum of a colored folk's whole makes them, them! Not because we feel like we went out and drew differences between those lines, but because the lines do not exist and at any given time we could connect to any one status if we take the time out to feel and not fight.