About 15 years ago, on Public School 241's concrete playground, a red-faced little boy named Timothy hit me with his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lunch box and told me to "Go back to Africa."
Indignant and determined to wipe the smirk off his face I attacked him with all the strength my six-year-old body could muster.
I was much more upset by the fact that he mistook my Jamaican accent for an African one than I was by how he rudely told me to get out of his country; mostly because I had an immense Jamaican pride and secondly because it was his country after all.
As far as my six-year-old, fresh-off-the-airplane mind could tell, this was Timothy's America and I was just a visitor.
I grew up and got over my resentment toward red-faced Timothy. I moved into a neighborhood where everyone was an immigrant, or the children of immigrants. I went to school and made friends with other immigrants and first generation citizens and settled into my life - my own little slice of America.
These days, I don't feel anything like a visitor to the United States. I shout "BROOKLYN!" in my best New York City voice whenever the opportunity to identify my hometown arises. Thanks to my naturalization in 1997, my vote will be among the numbered on Election Day, 2004.
After nine years and hundreds of American history classes, I know that Timothy - whose parents were probably immigrants - is not any more American than I am or my children will be.
But it is impossible to ignore the growing uneasiness among the Timothys of this nation, who are highly agitated by what they perceive as a hostile takeover of their precious country.
"These immigrants are taking away our jobs, filling up our children's schools, they are taking over," they say angrily; speaking of the Middle Eastern, African, South American and Caribbean immigrants that make their way to the US daily.
A commentator in "OutFoxed," a program I watched in my Communication class last week, told of the response he got when he made a mini-documentary outlining the immigrants' desire and hard work toward becoming citizens.
The ex-employee at Fox News said he was met with great resistance from higher-ups and a general, "how dare these people claim that they deserve any part of the United States."
While hardly anyone with a mind can claim that Fox News is at all a balanced news source, their resistance to recognizing immigrants as anything more than anti-American bloodsuckers certainly speaks for a segment of the population.
They speak for the selfish, bigoted segment of the population.
The African, Caribbean and Latin immigrants who leave their countries to escape persecution and famine are no worse than the Irish immigrants who flocked to the United States in the early 1900s to escape the ramifications of the potato famine.
No one turned them away, why should this generation's influx be turned away?
The jobs these immigrants undertake are certainly not the kind of employment anyone who has grown up the American way would envy. Not many members of the MTV generation would aspire to make a career of cleaning toilets in hotel rooms.
Statistics show that these immigrants are not "taking over" now any more than those in the early 1990s did.
According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' 2003 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, during the years of 1901 to 1910, 8,795,386 people emigrated to the US compared to 9,095,417 immigrants in 1991 to 2000.
Not much of a difference, especially considering world population growth and transportation advances.
From my perspective the major difference between immigrants today and those who made their way to the United States a century ago is the countries they come from and the racial parameters under which they fall.
For the Timothys and the Fox News representatives of the nation, the United States can continue being a great melting pot, as long as too much brown spice doesn't get thrown in.
