If the waitress has a Southern drawl you could cut with a knife, she refers to you as “Hon”, there are grits on the menu and country music playing in the background, the answer to “What kinda coke do y’all want?” may legitimately be Root Beer. 
NRATB explained it very well.
eta Oh, and Jodi did as well.
Exactly. I’ve been Black all my life (!) and have never heard someone of my skin tone say that they had a problem being called “Black.” Now I know people who prefer “African American,” and they’ll tell you that. But that does not mean you cause offense by calling them Black. It’s like meeting someone named Elizabeth. You might call her Elizabeth when you first meet her - that’s what her name is, after all - but once she tells you that she prefers Liz, you’d call her that. Now if you work with Liz every day, you’d be expected to retain that info. But if you’re meeting Liz at a cocktail party, if Liz is a reasonable person, she understands that you don’t know her preference, and you won’t retain it, either.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, I’ve ever known from Africa - Egyptians, Ethiopians, Kenyans, Ghanians, South African, Cameroonian (?) - has ever described themselves as “African American.” They actually have geographic nations and states that they claim. I have a friend who is from Cape Town - and while now, he also adds South Africa, I know that’s his most salient cultural identity (he refers to himself racially as “coloured,” btw). My Ghanian friends say they’re from Ghana. My Cape Verdean friends say that they’re from Cape Verde. I almost never hear the “American” part at the end, and I know a lot of these folks are citizens. Kids identify as being from a place, or having parents from a place, here in Boston. If you ask for Black kids you could get a number of kids who are not descended from slaves in the United States.
I know that some people wince a little with “Black,” and they tend to be a little color-struck. I have a really dark skinned friend who doesn’t like Black a lot because it was used against him in a pejorative way as a kid. But if you called him Black he wouldn’t get offended; that’s just something you would learn as you got to know him.
I’ve made this explanation before, but in a nutshell the term “African American” comes from the time of Marcus Garvey, who tried to reconnect Black Americans - in honesty, Black people worldwide - with a pride and knowledge of African history and culture. (You could also argue that Carter G. Woodson and W.E.B. Du Bois were in on this effort years later, but they clearly emphasized the experience of the Negro in America over his forbears.)
Politically, colored and negro lost favor in the early 60s, and Black people selected terms to define themselves. By the late 60s a strong cultural identity was reclaimed with the adoption of the term “African American,” a celebration of African cultural images (Afros, African names, African dance and music, styles like dashikis, and so on). But these were a hodgepodge of cultural themes from different regions of Africa, because the average Black American could not accurately trace his or her roots to a geographic site. (Alex Haley was a writer and researcher - his knowledge of his roots is a very rare thing among Black folks. I personally know of no Black American that has traced their roots back further than a few decades before the Civil War.) So a hybrid culture emerged.
Think of things like Kwanzaa and some popular African American names: you won’t find those traditions in any individual country or cultural group in Africa, but you can see where those traditions borrowed from. When you think about African Americans, there are very few groups - the Gulee, for instance - who know their culture and lineage from Africa well enough to trace it back. Most of us are a mixture of African nations. Many of us are proud of that heritage, and want to politically claim our successes as linked to the continent of Africa, which is regarded as backward and “dark” by many people, so we use African American. Plus it would be dumb to claim to be Ghanian, when in fact your family line, once traced, comes from Benin. African American is simultaneously precise, but also indicates the tragedy of losing the direct knowledge of our individual histories.
This is something that I think a lot of people don’t understand. It’s painful to me to know that my ancestors were not only abducted and beaten coming to America, but also that the traditions and histories that are part of my heritage are likely lost forever. No matter how much money I get, I will likely run into a dead end at some point. Not that it bugs me every day, but I remember being in fourth grade and hearing kids talking about their heritage during Genealogy Day, and realizing that though my last name sounds English, it’s pretty likely that my forbears did not majoritively emerge from the West Midlands. I don’t wish to get into a comparison match here. This is likely true of a lot of Whites as well, but there’s an intentionality about having that link severed that really is very sad and tragic. IMO.
African American has a distinct cultural and political meaning, and to suggest that Charlize Theron or Dave Matthews have the same understanding as Black Americans descended from African slaves do is ridiculous (and slanderous, as I have never heard either of them make this claim). But we don’t all have the same understanding of all phenomena. Today, in responding to a (Black) panhandler, Skip Gates said to the guy, Ask HH, he’s a rich negro." Now I know Gates uses that term affectionately. But other folks might have a real problem if they referred to Black folks as negroes! (I guess that’s a side benefit of being a public intellectual - people know your quirks a little!)
Probably from Jesse Jackson, when he said in a press conference back in 1988 that Americans should use the term African-American instead of Black. But I can’t see how a seven syllable compound word can expect to compete with a one syllable word.
Citage?
Not only not perjorative, but actually on cedulas to describe the holder of the cedula!
Remember that loooooooong GQ thread on the subject? I pulled up this article from the NYT:
I seem to remember there was a brief time in the late '60s or 70s when the term Afro-American would be heard now and then. But African-American seemed to displace it pretty quickly.
Would you happen to have any direct quotes from this press conference? My understanding is that Rev J.J. used the term African-American when describing blacks and it kind of caught on from there. But I don’t recall that he was urging anyone to do replace black with A-A.
Good thing, too, since we need the term to refer to Americans with that hairstyle.
No, I only have that article, although the wikipedia entry for African-American says something similar:
I did some poking around on the web, and there are some cites that claim he “endorsed” the term at a 1989 Civil Rights Summit, but no direct quotes.
Askia explained it to me in This GD Thread.
He and brickbacon did a very good job of helping me understand the overlap of various terms, starting at about post #14.
So, what are the people called who are native born Americans with roots in Nigeria? If not African-American, then what? And why and when did “African” come to mean “natural-born American black descendant of slaves” instead of being the adjectival form of “Africa”?
They’re called Barack Obama. 
Seriously, this gets really messy. We had a 5 page “discussion” on this subject awhile back in GQ. It actually was pretty fun.
Well, I cannot provide a written citation, but I have a pretty distinct memory of Dr. Jackson emerging at the end of a meeting over or near the Labor Day weekend and expressly making the assertion that he and the group he was with wanted the media to change the references from “black” (a reference to appearance) to “African American” (a reference to origins and roots that was expressly parallel to “Irish-American” or “Italian-American”).
I will also note that while there were a very few expressions of Afro-American and African-American in the 1960s and early 1970s, the only word that appeared in the media from that point until the late 1980s was “black.”
Actually I’ve heard Obama referred to- several times- as “the son of an African-American father and a white mother”. Always irritates me- his father was Kenyan… that’s AFRICAN, not African-American. Whether Obama Sr. was a citizen or not I don’t know, but he it’s quite alright to say he has an “African” or “black” father (for otherwise people might not know he isn’t purebred white and elect him to the presidency and then before you know it we’d have Tito Jackson as Secretary of Defense, Jesse Jackson as Secretary of State, Jimmy JJ Walker as Secretary of Education and Whitney Houston as Secretary of Agriculture and then he’d bankrupt the Workman’s Comp claiming he fell and hurt himself in the White House [which would now be made HUD and constantly getting complaints from the neighbors about the loud parties and all the cars on the lawn] and all society would break down).
Or just say his dad was from Kenya but Barack grew up in Kansas with his single mom and her parents. That’s really the more important part.
Pretty much.
The term African-American…well, frankly, any hyphenated-American terminology…is nothing more than modern day political correctness. And as usual, the politically correct have it all wrong.
Just to be clear: His mom was from Kansas, but he didn’t grow up there. He was born in Hawaii and grew up there (except for a few years in Indonesia).
So he’s one of those Kenyan-Kansan-Hawaiian-Indonesian-African-Euro-Americans.
Damn. If he’s elected there goes any resale value on the White House. Once one Kenyan-Kansan-Hawaiian-Indonesian-African-Euro-American moves in it’s like they open the floodgates.
wrong how? If someone has Irish roots and is now a proud native-born American, and wishes to express this combination of influences by calling themselves “Irish-American”, why shouldn’t they do so? I’ve often seen people say something like “why all this hyphenation? why can’t we just be Americans?”, but I think that’s trying to make there be a problem when there isn’t one. It’s not like someone who identifies as “Irish-American” does NOT also identify as being just plain “American”.
When American citizens start getting huffy when you refer to them, collectively, as “Americans”, and insist that hyphenated designations be used at all times, then get back to me.
I’m curious: what term would you use to describe my distant cousins on my paternal grandfather’s side, Jews who originated in what is now Latvia and Lithuania, emigrated to South Africa beginning about 130 years ago, stayed a while (anywhere from 3 - 5 generations), and are now dispersed throughout South Africa, the U.S., the U.K., Israel, the Netherlands, and Australia, by way of (in various combinations) all of the above countries, plus Argentina, France, and Iran (and probably a few others that I’m forgetting at the moment)?
I’m also thinking of an unfortunate very left-wing, half-German/half-Afrikaner friend of mine, who used to do things like go to the townships near Johannesburg to do literacy tutoring during the worst of the upheavals that surrounded the end of apartheid. He got kicked out of the ANC, basically because he was white (or at least that’s what he says, and I have no particular reason to disbelieve him). He was very upset about it, too, saying “how the hell am I not African? My family’s been here for hundreds of years!” He finished school and couldn’t find a job, and has been working in Taiwan for years now.
I would call them South African, American, British, Israeli, Dutch and Australian. Plus Argentinian, French and Iranian (though not Persian, since that is an ethnic group).