Two responses, and kindly bear with me. First, I totally, completely get where you're coming from, and in fact wrote an article about the same thing just recently, with much the same message.

And. There is another way to hear this, and experience it, and again, bear with me. As someone who travels all over the world regularly, that travel has taught me to deeply appreciate and value people's history, ancestry and culture. I love language, and when I hear the trills of a familiar accent, such as central Kenya where I have spent time, I may ask that very question. The question has nothing whatsoever to do with trying to identify "otherness," rather, for me, it is an opportunity to share an experience, a space, a place, and a rich appreciation of having been to the land of someone's birth, family and heritage. For me it is a connector, it establishes how we have something to celebrate. Every single time, when someone allows me that chance, I am able to offer up a memory, a shared experience, and that in every single way makes for a big chunk of shared joy. I see them, they see me, and we see a land through different eyes, just as I am able to offer a moment wherein I can honestly say I have walked on the ground of your ancestors, your family. It is a wholly other way of expressing Sawubona. For in being a traveler, I am able to put someone's background into context, and from the stand point of a journalist, to me it is a deep honor to see the roots of someone's family history, and share my joy in having walked those lands.

While I get in every way what you're saying and why, please understand that I am well aware that my particular attitude and intention around this question aren't common. That said, I am fully aware of why the question itself is triggering, and why it is supremely insulting if not aggressive when White folks, and I am one- push to establish that well, you can't be American, because...fill in the blank.

I only offer this up as perspective. Because we are all immigrants, no matter where we are, and we carry the buckets of dirt and memories of the breezes through the trees, distant snowcaps or the profiles of animals on the horizons of our youth in our DNA. We all have this. Just as I carry such things with me from my Florida upbringing, so do we all from our birthlands. The soles of our shoes carry the souls of our fathers and mothers, and our history. For my part, I delight in both honoring that history, whether I am able to share having been in Croatia or Kenya with someone whose accent I recognize, or simply being able to acknowledge the extraordinary journey it has taken to be where we are right here and right now.

Again, I don’t argue your point at all, for I see the damage that the insistence on establishing "American-ness" or any other "-ness" does to people of color all over the world. Medium writer Rebecca Stevens A. writes of this with great eloquence as she is a Swiss citizen, and her experiences are heartbreaking. The compulsion to justify explusion (go back where you came from) is hardly limited to America.

Just, there are other ways to hear and understand the question. I have tried my best to find other ways to learn without using that specific query, but my intentions remain the same. I am interested in what connects us, not what separates us. This is how we heal.