What a people call themselves isn’t necessarily indicative of what they would like others to call them, or of how they’d like to be referred to in certain social contexts. Some blacks refer to themselves as niggers, but those same blacks would be deeply offended if a non-black person called them that. Americans sometimes proudly refer to themselves as Yankees, but would probably find it jarring or even offensive if they encountered that in a school or government application form.
So what were all the people living in North America and Africa before the relatively recent invention of countries? Chopped liver?
That’s possible, but then my question is, what is in the style guide to refer to black people who don’t happen to be American?
I wasn’t – not till I read this thread this morning.
Of course, I don’t follow sports, and this past week or so I’ve been too busy to really keep up with any news, let alone F1. I had heard of Hamilton; that he was young, British, and had won a Grand Prix. In the paper this morning, I saw that he’d won another and (in a separate story) is selling his kart of e-bay. I’ve not seen or heard his race being mentioned anywhere – even looking at the photos in the paper I couldn’t tell. Has more been made of it previously?
Yes.
‘Could this man be as big as Tiger Woods?’ - Observer, 15 Apr 2007
‘How the first black F1 driver realised his boyhood dream’ - Times, 24 Nov 2006
‘Hamilton eyes grand prize’ (‘…tells Richard Rae of his resolve to become the first black driver to compete in F1’) - Times, 10 July 2005
Lewis Hamilton is British, and happens to be mixed-race. He’s neither ‘black’ nor ‘African’ anything - his paternal grandparents having come from Grenada.
If he calls himself black, is he not black? (See my third link above: ‘I’ve come from a poor black family’.) Many British people with one black parent self-identify in this way.
Yes, but their ancesters would have come from Africa, probably by the same route as African Americans’ ancestors.
The aboriginal ‘race’ in the Caribbean is Carib; all others are long-standing interlopers, including mine (white) and my adopted sister’s (black).
And all of that is good and all, but I’m black and I have no problems being called black. No other black person that I know minds being called black, either. I honestly don’t know where the assumption came from that it’s wrong to call someone black.
A majority of African-Americans are “mixed-raced”. Yet they are all black as the day is long.
This argument was so much more fun when it happened between an extremely white dude who was from Kenya and a mildly-xenophobic guy who really wanted to be politically correct.
“I’m not African American, man.”
“But you’re from Africa?”
“Yes, that makes me African.”
“But you’re…not black!”
“Holy shit, really? Thanks for the heads up!”
It seems to me to be a misunderstanding, stemming from the far less accepted use of the word as a noun rather than as an adjective.
If you go out and say that you drive an african american Lexus because you don’t dare say the word black, I am more inclined to think racist than to think very polite.
And this is only a half joke. Here in PR, they use the word “prieto” as a semi-PC way to refer to black people and to avoid using the word “negro” (black). Some people now use the word to describe black objects.
I am more inclined to think doesn’t know much about cars given that Lexus is made by Toyota a Japanese company.
The title of your thread implies that there are no black African Americans. You probably should have said “Not all black people are African American”.
I’m just sayin’
Perhaps. AP usage, at any rate, is to use “black” as a physical descriptor and “African-American” as a cultural one. “African-American” in this context usually refers to the American descendants of slaves from sub-Saharan Africa, although it can include voluntary immigrants. The definition is hardly rigid.
I don’t see the problem we have with what to call a white person from South Africa. He is a South African-American, just like a Kenyan who has emigrated here and gotten his citizenship as a Kenyan-American, or someone from Ethiopia is an Ethiopian-American, etc. I wouldn’t call any of these African-Americans. To me, “African-American” is not just somebody from Africa who is American. The terms is slightly more limited than that, as I’ve outlined above.
Why imagine? “Black American” is not unheard of, although currently not the favoured term. It certainly isn’t considered racially charged.
“African American” has a set definition. It is not simply the marrying of the geographical terms “African” and “American.” “African American” specifically refers to descendants of black Africans. That’s all there is to it. A Libyan who moves to America becomes an “Arab American.” A white South African becomes a white or European American. Period. That’s all there is to it.
har har
Reminds me of “I’m black?! Does Dad know?!”
For the Southern thing, though… generally if you ask for a Coke in a restaurant you will get Coke. If it’s a small non-chain locally owned down-home kind of place, though, you might be asked what kind.
If you are at someone’s house and they’re going to the fridge for you and they say “Do you want a Coke?” and you say “Yes” they will probably say “What kind?”
If you are at someone’s house and they’re going to the fridge for you and YOU say “Can you get me a Coke?” they will still probably ask you “What kind?”
If you go to a restaurant and you ask “What kind of Coke do you have?” they will answer with something like “Pepsi products” or “Dr Pepper, Coke, Sprite…”
It threw me for a bit of a loop for the first… six months I lived here or so. I’ve got used to it in sixteen years. 
Proof: Harvard Dialect Study
This is where the 12.38% comes from. Scroll down to see choice C, the green. While there are instancse all over the place, they are centralized in south and east Texas east to the Carolinas, south through Florida.
Less common than soda, and they’ll know what you mean when you say soda in the South. They might not get what you mean or know it immediately if you ask for a pop.
You misread his point, which was not that all individual sodas are called “coke” (7-Up != coke, root beer != coke, orange != coke), but the entire class of beverages we call “soda” are called, collectively, “cokes.” The obtuse and pendantic way you read it doesn’t even make any sense.
I recently moved from Washington State to North Carolina. While eating lunch (buffet, naturally) in a small cafe in a tiny coastal town, I too ordered a Coke only to be asked what kind of coke I wanted. Why? Because in that little town, “coke” is the generic southern term for “soda” and therefore if you order a “coke” you must specify what kind of coke you want, just as if you order a “soda” you must specify the kind of soda. If you want a Coca-cola, you order a “co-cola.”
You’re making a big hairy deal – and in a fairly snotty way – about what was a tangential point, and a largely correct one at that.