Patriotic for what?

I am a light-skinned African American. My family's roots, a mixture of Africans, Europeans and Native Americans, can be traced back more than 200 years ago to Charleston, S.C. Such a long and diverse heritage gives me more of a right to claim American citizenship than most white Americans, the majority of whom immigrated long after the end of the African slave trade in 1808. Yet in the current national climate, I now have to worry about being stopped because I'm black and being stopped because I may look like an Arab.\nPresident George W. Bush and other officials have called for Americans to return to their "normal" way of life, for the terrorists wanted to "frighten" us out of our normalcy. Businesses such as General Motors and General Electric also appeal to Americans' spending habits; it seems one is truly patriotic if one spends a dollar. Meanwhile, civil liberties and constitutional rights are effortlessly tossed aside in the name of national security; hundreds of Arab Americans and Arab-looking men have been detained since Sept. 11. Many of the detainees have never been charged, while others have not been allowed to speak with a lawyer. \nFurthermore, thousands of Arab Americans and those who look like them (such as my sister) have suffered from police harassment, racial attacks and discrimination that few other Americans would tolerate peacefully. The Northwest Airlines case where a pilot ordered three Iraqi Americans off a flight because the passengers did not want to fly with Arabs sounds like Nazi Germany, South Africa or the American South?\nIs this what I'm supposed to proudly wave the American flag for? The illegal detention and civil rights violations of Arab Americans? Where is the NAACP in all of this, which seems to be cowardly ducking its responsibility? \nMoreover, just what "normal" way of life am I expected to endorse and return to? We live in a society that openly tolerates a discriminatory criminal justice system. Drug possession laws are intended to create lifelong criminals out of poor African American drug users. Those arrested for crack cocaine possession receive sentences 100 times greater than for powdered cocaine. Once imprisoned, inmates receive little education or training; state and national politicians have cut that portion of prison budgets drastically over the past twenty years. When private correctional corporations such as Wackenhut plead with state officials in Arkansas and Mississippi to send them more prisoners, it's easy to conclude that it's more profitable for America to have lifelong criminals.\nOther signs of "normalcy" include an African American poverty rate that is three times higher than whites, a one in three chance for black males that they will be arrested at some point in their lives, a judicial system that has turned its back on affirmative action because it believes that racism doesn't exist, and a shameful police brutality record involving white officers and black suspects (how come one never hears of black officers beating white suspects?). \nSo we have the creation of two Americas, one for the patriots and one for the dispossessed, where racial profiling and injustice is accepted as "normal." But the patriots also have an uneasy status; GE encourages them to consume, then fires American workers and closes up factories to relocate abroad. Is this the normalcy I am supposed to wish for?