Imagine yourself as an African American and resident of the State of Alabama in 1964, the year that President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the historic Civil Rights Act. And again imagine in 1964 that Alabama Governor George Wallace, in an act of defiance that not even he considered, introduced legislation to expel all African Americans from Alabama.
Now fast forward to the year 2007, over four decades later, when the citizens of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma voted last March to expel their black citizens in a manner that equaled if not surpassed the most vitriolic attacks against African Americans in the once segregated South.
for the rest of her comments:
(Big difference here between the United States and the Cherokee Nation - first of all the US is indeed a melting pot of immigrants, the Cherokee Nation is made up of Cherokees with set membership requirements, which is among the most lenient of all the Native American Tribes. So she's trying to compare apples and oranges. She apparently doesn't see the Cherokee Nation as a sovereign Nation but as *part of the general US population*. She needs to imagine herself as a Native American who is constantly under the hammer of Congress and subject to the whim of the political winds. Ruled by a conglomerate of rules that may or may not apply depending on how the courts rule. Again she plays on the emotion of *us poor black slave descendants*, get over the slave mentality and move on)