Do We Really Need to Say, "African American?"

I take issue with the term "African American."

I often read things about the "African American vote," for example, compared to, say, the "white vote." By changing "black" to "African American," a segment of the population is made foreign. An African American is an American of African descent. Which of course, is entirely true. However, I find the term racist, when taken in perspective. You start at home (America) and then take it to a faraway place (Africa) and a black person becomes an American who is from Africa. By using the descriptive "African," the subtle implication is that it stands opposite an American (or an American American), which is an American from America.

"White," if you notice, does not get the same foreign stature. European Americans, described as "white," are not subject to the same "non-nativity" that the blacks are. "My coworker is African American," they will tell you, and when you ask them what they themselves are, they will reply, "I'm white, just plain old American." The whites become American ("American" Americans, an American of American descent) and the blacks become African ("African" Americans). A Chinese American becomes an American of Chinese descent, someone who was once foreign and came here to be among the Americans, the African Americans and the Mexican Americans.

And let us not forget the Native Americans, who quite frankly, are the only ones who should be described simply as "American." I think we should remove this racist methodology altogether. And if we are going to use it at all by inserting country (or continent, to clarify for Sarah Palin), then we should be consistent with it. It's racist and ethnocentric to say that a British American is an American while we make African Americans from a faraway land. There should be African Americans and Italian Americans and Chinese Americans and Irish Americans, British Americans, and so on.

Actually, this brings up another point. If we are going to use Italian American and Chinese American describing the country of origin, which we often do, then why are blacks categorized into a continent? Don't they deserve descriptions of similar stature, like Ethiopian American or Kenyan American? I realize that many Americans of African descent do not know the country of origin which would make this difficult. I just don't see why we need to use it when we don't use it for European Americans.

"This black friend of mine was...." Most people have said something similar to this at some point. They describe a party they may have attended with their black friend. Or a movie they saw with their black friend. Or this black guy who asked a certain question in a meeting. This amazes me. For centuries, black people can tell you exactly who they are describing from the party or the movie or the meeting without using the race description.

Similarly, white people can tell you that they went to a movie with that tall friend of theirs, the short haired friend, the pudgy balding friend. I realize that sometimes when you have a group of, say, ten white people and one black person, it may be the easiest way to pinpoint the black person. I argue that it's not always true that the easiest way is the best way. What if we were to think of the very next descriptive term that could indicate that person? If they are black and tall and wearing the only red shirt in the party, we skip the "black" and say the "tall" guy, or the guy with the "red shirt." Imagine the same group of eleven people, only this time they are all white. Now you would have to look beyond the skin color and describe the person using different adjectives.

Considering the history of race isolation that our country has had to deal with, is it really that draining on the energy sources to go down the list to the next descriptive adjective to pinpoint someone? You could describe the guy as the tall guy in a suit from the party. And your friend will ask you, "You mean the black guy?" And you could say, "Yes, but he was also the tallest and the only one in a suit." And your friend will be flabbergasted at the fact that you didn't just say African American.

Comments

[Metienne]

In the 1970's Ramona Hoage Edlin, President of the National Urban Coalition, coined the term "African American" as an alternative to Black. Ms. Edlin maintained that "When a child in a ghetto calls himself African-American, immediately he"s international. The change takes him from the ghetto and puts him on the globe. It helps us realize that we are not just former slaves living in the U.S. and makes it easier to change our children"s dwarfed perceptions of themselves."

Jesse Jackson then promoted it as a means to link black Americans to their African heritage, urging blacks to use the term to describe themselves because of its reference to both a land and a cultural base. The term was intended to suggest that blacks had an ethnic history that predated slavery while also recognizing a link to an ancestral motherland; in short, as an expression of pride in black American culture and its African origins. Through popular use, it has become accepted as a term for all blacks, although the term "African-American" was originally intended to refer only to descendants of slaves brought to the United States centuries ago and not to immigrants who have not inherited the legacy of bondage, segregation and discrimination.

[saami]

The sooner we realize that we are all Americans and stop catergorizing people, the better. If you are trying to describe the person then say he has brown eyes, tall, light brown skin, a suit, etc. just like you would say he has blue eyes, tall, light skin with freckles, a suit, etc. Clumping people into categories makes you cease to see them as individuals. i agree with the comment that Africa is the mother continent of us all; we are in fact all brothers and sisters of the same family, the human family.

[BuzzingAlong]

Thank you, Doon Baqi. My skin color is brown but I have never referred to myself or any other AMERICAN with dark skin a African American.

Not all black people came from Africa. Why is this such a difficult concept for so many people?

[mredder4]

"I realize that many Americans of African descent do not know the country of origin which would make this difficult."

Genetic testing has been done on this subject and it is now possible to use DNA to trace one's country of origin, even within Africa. It's no one's fault if a black person is unwilling to go the distance to find out exactly where they're from, rather than cling to an identity that not only denies them inclusion with the "all American" label but also prevents them from knowing the fullness of their ancestry.

I'm white, of German and Polish descent, but I was born to soldiers, on an air force base, and I consider myself an American. No prefixes or suffixes, no modifiers. American, like the flag, and the cheese, and the anthem.

I really wish that black people could feel that, but they choose an outsider's status by insisting on "African-American". It's as if they're saying "We want to be IN America, but not OF America", and that's just insulting to this country, which I find offensive.

Do you see a lot of African-Jamaicans? African-Haitians? African-Brazilians? No. Those other countries all have significant (if not majority or total) black populations, and you don't see them dividing themselves like we do here in America. I wonder how they ended up being more progressive than we are.

[LewDan]

You attempt a distinction without a difference. Yes any reference to ancestral nation or continent is racist. What's wrong with that? HOT FLASH: Racial differences exit! Nothing inherently wrong with people alluding to them.

You're trying to make a case for indiscriminately condemning any racial reference, without regard to context, as inappropriate. That's racist -- and not in a good way.

I'm black. My great grandfather was a slave. A good chunk of my family pass for white. There're lots of white people darker than I am. I preferred "colored" as I'm hardly "black" but accept black or African American in deference to those who insist (revel apparently) in willfully taking offense at "colored." (Though "people of color" is somehow more than acceptable. Another distinction without a difference.)

Neither am I "African-American." I'm one of those who not only doesn't know which country/region of Africa descent flows from, I don't even know descent flows from Africa. It's just assumed. I know nothing of Africa. I'm an American.

Complaining over non-blacks having the temerity to refer to blacks being different, when there're differences, using specious terminology objections, is racist. The willful offense some gleefully take in use of this term or that in spite of context, intent, or appropriateness, is racist. Arguments that blacks cannot be racists because institutional racism... blah, blah, blah -- are racist.

To quote you: "you have a group of, say, ten white people and one black person" -- yes, he's the black guy.

[Metienne]

Yes. I find it ludicrous and offensive for someone to maintain that it is inappropriate to use race or ethnicity as a descriptor. It implies that some of us should be ashamed of our origins. As you say, pretending that there is no difference is racist - in a bad way.

[Swerinjer2]

The age of white guilt is over. we can now talk about this.

[neoprimordial]

Insofar as White people referring to "this Black friend of mine," I believe it depends on who's talking to whom and under what circumstances. If you're a White person talking mostly to White people, I think it's only natural for you to refer to the Black person as Black. LIkewise if you're Black referring to mostly Black people about a White person, or an Asian person for that matter. Whether we like it or not, our skin color is one of the most distinctive aspects of our appearance, and thanks to legacy of racism in the United States and the rest of the world, it seems to be the one thing we notice above all others. No harm / no foul for going with what you know or notice most, and it's kind of silly to not mention it, unless of course it's assumed--which leads us back to the context. If I'm telling a friend about my vacation in Nigeria and mention the run-in I had with a taxi driver there, I don't think I'd need to mention that he was Black, but if he weren't it might behoove me to say so, for clarity's sake.

[neoprimordial]

The overwhelming majority of Black people in the United States who are descendants of slaves cannot trace their ancestry back to any particular country in Africa. What other term might we use to describe them? Freemen? Freedmen? Fremen? The Afro-expatrie? "African-American" is a subtly racist euphemism to deal with the problem and dismiss it. When we get advanced enough with the human genome and biology, we'll be closer to dispensing with such terms altogether, but the language is symptomatic of a visual and auditory problem: do you look and sound like an American Black person? If you do in America you're an African-American descendant of slaves, whether or not you can trace your family heritage back two dozen generations to one country in Africa or to some place other than Africa. Barack Obama is an "African-American" and culturally nothing more in the collective American consciousness simply because he looks and sounds like a Black man born and raised here, despite his "plain ol' American" mother and his ability to trace his African lineage to a particular country. It is a shame and one day maybe decades from now it will change, but for now this is our reality. It does help, however, to raise the issue from time to time.

[neoprimordial]

Nobody says "European American" because the ancestors of said European Americans conquered this land and laid down the rules under which it operates. When someone says "I'm White, just plain ol' American," that person is saying that the most prominent or significant lineage in his/her descent is from those conquerors--"blue-blood" if he/she is really pushing it. When someone else who looks White says "I'm Italian-American," or "I'm Irish-American," or "I'm Portuguese-American," that person is saying that he/she is a descendant of immigrants. It's a shame that the term "African-American" is used as a catchall for anyone living in the United States who happens to look Black, not just because of the legacy of slavery but also because there are various Black immigrants who are not African-American.

[Promise]

I think that the answer to this question is to see all of us as Children of God.

[WICKET99]

This is off subject, but I went to breakfast with my parents years ago. My mother mentioned someone's name and I said "which one is that?" She said "the lady with gray hair and glasses".
Well, we were out with their "senior" friends, and everyone had gray hair and glasses.

Maybe we need to be more conscious of the labels we use, and whether they are necessary or not.

[LMPE]

If we say "African-American", the really weird part is "American". That word means "of the Americas", meaning the entire western hemisphere, not the United States of America (I don't know how it came to refer to the USA). Canadian PM Stephen Harper, Cuban singer Silvio Rodriguez and Brazilian director Walter Salles are all Americans. In Spanish there's a demonym "estadounidense" meaning "of the United States". I doubt that in English we could say "United States-ian".

Part of the reason that we identify people's race or skin color is because it's practically the first thing that one person notices about another person. If Max von Sydow, Nelson Mandela and Junichiro Koizumi stand next to each other, it would be easy to tell them apart. I don't know how much of a discussion I could go into about all this, but I do hope that we can eventually deal with our racist history.

[Wolfgang]

This all started because American Blacks did not want immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean joining their organizations. It was a way of excluding them.

[TruDude]

I grew up i an area where there lived mainly whites and Mexicans in Arizona. We had other minorities and luckily, at a young age, I realized that race was not the correct way to single people out. I was in the minority of thinking back then. I use descriptions such as the guy that was in the red shirt or the woman with a huge smile. I like the fact that my kids are growing up in a day where I hope we lose such terms as African Americans and use the term that should be used, Americans.

[MBryant]

All people originally came from Africa, some of our genes just were altered by other locales along the way. So I guess ultimately all Americans are African Americans.

If people who have ethnicity traits currently characterized by Africa are called African Americans then those with paler traits associated with Europe should logically be called European Americans.

I'm not arguing that these apparent racial characteristics are irrelevent. They are very significant because people act on them. But Mr. Obama clearly indicates how simplistic and strange our definitional terms are - because he actual is African American while the ethnic population he is assumed to belong to could be better called Americans of African ascestry.

Mr. Obama - with a Harvard education - probably knows more about European language and history than most whites. There are certainly white professors and others who know Africa better.

White and Black as labels make more sense - because they starkly clarify that the social impact is mostly about appearances...