"The national crusade of "Take Back America" by tea party activists and the Arizona Legislature is as bigoted as it is absurd. It will catch on in states like Missouri, South Carolina, and the Dakotas.

The crusade is about "illegal immigrants" and the theory of white European immigration as the settlers know it.

It's also about the hostility of a nation that prides itself on being a nation of immigrants, while ironically putting up fences to keep neighbors from Mexico out. It's a little like the gated communities so popular in the cities of our country.

The theory is that anyone coming here since 1900 is not eligible. When White Europeans made up the census of newcomers, when Africans were considered barely surviving slave populations, and indigenous peoples were thought to be inferior and vanishing, it was a world, then, the settlers said, for the "taking".

Today, it is about the need of America to see itself as an all-white majority regime. It is about losing the white-only power maintained for 200 years.

It's about a black president in a white-power country. Tea partiers expect Barack Obama to "show his papers" (birth certificate) in public over and over again because he is a black man who they believe has no right to the presidency.

It is about segregating Indians in 1880, and African slaves in 1860, and "taking" whatever white power has wanted."

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Elizabeth Cook-Lynn: Tea party cry ironic given history of ancestors (The Rapid City Journal 8/30)