African-Canadian doesn’t seem to be unheard of.
So can every member of the Species Homo Sapiens- alive or dead. Thus, this part of the definition is meaningless, as it is non-limiting.
Almost no racial term is 100% “valid” as there are no “races” as we think of them. Africans include dudes who aren’t black, “Blacks” include dudes who are lighter colored than me or whose ancestors haven’t seen Africa for 30000 years.
Until this thread, I have never heard of limiting the term “African American” soley to those with “Negro” characteristics whose ancestors were recently slaves. I have only heard it used to include those “blacks” who were Americans, and sometimes, in a somewhat jocular manner- to those who are white South Africans. I’ll point out this is not due to ignorance, as I was on the EEO committee for a Government agency for a couple of years. For all I knew “AA= Black”. For almost everything but American Indian, dudes were allowed to “self-identify”. In other words, if you said you were black/AA/Asian/Hispanic/Latino/Mexican-American/White/Caucasian/whatever, we accepted it and went on. No one ever said “Well, you claim you were discriminated against because you were African-American- can you show evidence you are descended from Pre-Civil War American slaves?” :dubious: In fact, there was one dudette with lighter skin than mine, (but with a “'Fro”) who filed a claim, and no one said anything or asked any questions about her self-identification as “African-American”.
So, I’d be very interested if anyone here can find a USA legal discrimination case where some dude was asked to prove his eligibility for the group “African American” by showing that his ancestors were slaves.
But as you just indicated, people are allowed to self-identify. (The exception for American Indians surprises me, although I understand many tribes do have mechanisms to decide who officially counts as part of their tribe.) I have never once heard of anyone being asked to prove they were black, or Latino, or Asian. So I’m confused as to what probative value you think can be found on census forms.
And in fact, you’re still missing the point, as what Askia’s been saying (as far as I’ve seen; it’s certainly what I’ve been saying) is that ancestry is largely irrelevant in itself; it’s membership in a particular culture that qualifies one as “African-American” and not just “black”. After all, Afro-Caribbeans come from approximately the same origins, but Askia has explicitly excluded them from the term “African-American”. Many people who consider themselves “African-Americans” and probably would be considered so by you or I have mostly European ancestry. If you’re trying to boil down membership in a culture to some specific criterion, you’re going to find lots of border cases. One basic fact about this cultural definition is that it’s not generally provable.
Sure, if you decide that Australian Aborigines or negritos are “black”, but the term is not generally treated as including them. While we’re all descended from Africans, some of us are tens of thousands of years removed and others are mere hundreds of years removed. I don’t see the point you’re making here, since the difference between those two things is obvious.
But Askia has no right to exclude them. A person has the right to **include ** themselves. No one has the right to exclude or include others (American Indians are an exception as there are *legal * defintions of what makes one a Member of one tribe or another). Thus, if Dude A claims he is “African American” he is African American, not matter where he or his parents were born or what shade his skin is.
This is the way it is, and the way it must be, until the Law gets around to defining “African American”. Otherwise, it’s *entirely * a matter of self-identification. Even for Charlize Theron, or Sen Obama. Neither Askia nor you get to say that either person isn’t allowed to self-identify themselves as “African-American”.
If I say I’m white, is that enough to make me white?
Is anyone going around lambasting Senator Obama for calling himself “African-American”? Or other black immigrants? Have there been a wave of people being kicked out of the African-American Club? Is Colin Powell no longer allowed to buy menthol cigarettes and grape soda? Of course not. We’ve discussed evidence for non-slave-descended black Americans calling themselves “African-American” in the thread already; while obviously it happens, it’s certainly not overwhelmingly the norm either. If there were large groups of black Jamaicans demanding to be called “African-Americans”, I would certainly not begrudge them that. But I don’t see much evidence of people being “excluded” here.
And has Charlize Theron done so outside of one (surprisingly funny) SNL skit? Actually, if she did, I would be perfectly willing to call her a vacuous idiot and try to slap some sense into her - because whatever else, the term “African-American” is certainly reserved for people with at least some black Subsaharan African ancestry. You’re edging awfully close to disingenuousness here if you think one may honestly define oneself as African-American when one is not; while for obvious reasons it’s necessary to permit that on government paperwork, if Charlize Theron did so it would represent deliberate deception. (Fortunately, as far as I’ve seen of the woman in interviews and so forth, my experience has been that not only is she luminously beautiful and a tremendously talented actress, she’s also rather unpretentious and a good bit too smart to engage in such game-playing.)
If you’ll permit me, you’re still being pretty uptight about this. Definitions of culture are not simple, and your stance here is reductionist. You’re not going to come to an understanding of a complex cultural phenomenon by demanding some simple definition. By any reasonable standard, I am not African-American. I’m white, was born in the U.S. of various Poles, Germans, Norwegians, and other such Europeans, almost all of whom arrived within the last hundred and fifty years; I have no black ancestry that I know of. If I were to call myself “African-American”, it would be absolutely ridiculous. While I might have a legal right to do so, it would be deceptive and I doubt many actual African-Americans would be particularly inclined to support me in “discovering my new identity”.
Actually, if you go back to the start of this thread, several posters insisted Sen Obama isn’t African American". However, then someone posted a quote where Sen Obama said he was. Which is good enough for me- at that point in time everyone else is wrong and Sen Obama is right. He has self-identified himself as AA, and he is the only one who can include or exclude himself.
“The term “African-American” is certainly reserved for people with at least some black Subsaharan African ancestry” by whom? Who has made this rule and what are their qualifications? Can you point me to a SCOTUS ruling? A Federal Law? Or are you the Source who gets to decide just who is African American or not? (or is it Askia?) If so, how much “sub saharan African ancestry”? How far back? What do you mean by “black”? Who is black- how dark does your skin have to be? How thick your lips, how curly your hair, how broad your nose? :rolleyes: :rolleyes: Along exactly what line of Latitude is “sub-saharan”?
I hope you have no answers, as IMHO- there are none. You are who you say you are. No one else gets to say otherwise in this Nation. That’s the only simple defintion.
Here we go again…
Dr. Deth: We’ve largely been discussing what the term commonly means when it’s used by your average American. While it makes a funny joke to say C.T. is A-A, very few Americans would call her that. OTOH, most Americans would agree that Colin Powell is A-A. Ditto Barack Obama. The term is fuzzy enough without people purposely trying to make it even more fuzzy.
Actually, if you read the thread a bit more carefully, it’s clear that Senator Obama’s claim is a bit more complicated than you’ve made it out to be. And further, while it does rather boggle the mind to imagine a politician possibly stretching the truth, other politicians have done so in the past as well. Hillary Clinton, for instance, once claimed to be named after Sir Edmund Hillary, a claim that, it turns out, is almost certainly false, as he didn’t achieve any significant renown until after her birth. Or, for a non-political example, Oprah once claimed, while visiting South Africa, to be descended from the Zulu, which for various reasons is assuredly false. People may exaggerate, or fudge the facts a little, or perhaps Obama feels, due to his color and his long association with the African-American community, that he is part of that culture and has shared in that cultural experience. We discussed this extensively; it seems to be the case that - the conditions of one’s ancestors aside - most of us agree that Obama has a legitimate claim on being “African-American”.
Only if you imagine that one can somehow identify the circumstances of everyone’s ancestors with perfect precision can you imagine using ancestry alone as a test. I still maintain that this reductionist style of argument is one that is particularly ill-suited for this issue.
By the users of the term.
Did I represent my claim as a matter of law? No. I declared it as a matter of fact.
DrDeth, we have already discussed the legal side of this; it is perfectly obvious why no “legal test” for African-Americanness can be found. References to the law have absolutely no relevance at all to what you’re saying, because we are not discussing the legal status of African-Americans. Whatever legal definitions exist are likely contradictory anyway, as this is historically a contentious issue.
Fine. Propose some definition of “African-American” that fits anyone who wants it, regardless of ancestry, and yet still has some broader meaning beyond “This person has attached this particular label to himself.”
He’s got a better claim on it than you or I.
Why are you bringing up things that have already been addressed? As is obvious to anyone with any understanding of the topic whatsoever, many African-Americans have substantial amounts - sometimes a majority - of non-Subsaharan African ancestry.
You know, I’ve been saying for post after post with you that we are defining a cultural term, and thus there is no simple definition, and that frankly there is some fuzziness around the edges. You seem to cling to a bizarre, simplistic notion that there is no way to discuss the term without either defining it in some rigid, arbitrary way, or deciding that it has no definition at all. Since every bit of reasoning you have applied in this thread is based upon this serious problem of comprehension, and since you insist on bringing things up that have been discussed at length and then divesting them of every bit of complexity that the discussion has involved, I see no point in discussing this further. This is clearly an issue for which you have more emotional commitment than intellectual understanding. I don’t wish to spend the next several days responding to the same argument over and over again, which it appears will be the inevitable result if I continue speaking to you.
Amazing. Are you serious, or are you playing some sort of a game here? You have come up with a definition so simple as to have no meaning whatsoever, and you maintain that you have somehow solved some sort of problem. There is no simple definition, as I have pointed out over and over and over; your insistence that we must settle for one, even if it has no value at all, is bizarre and clearly reflects some problem on your part that makes any further discussion absolutely useless.
Tell me, though, does this work in other contexts? Most of my extended family is Catholic, but I was not brought up in the Church and indeed was never baptized. Can I claim to be Catholic? I like Chinese food and I speak Mandarin - do I get to claim to be Chinese if I wish? I always found the story of the Exodus rather inspiring, I find the Jewish approach to law both fascinating and intellectually satisfying, my mother is overbearing, and (once again) I like Chinese food. Does that mean I can decide I’m Jewish? In fact, that’s a good example, because there is a simple definition of Judaism - though there is no central authority to decide on the peripheral cases. So are Ethiopian Jews really Jewish? Some other Jews maintain that they’re not. What about Samaritans? Karaites? Imagine that I am Jewish. How do I know? Jews have a long history of intermarriage with non-Jews, which means that the Jewish community in most areas doesn’t look substantially different from the non-Jewish community. How can I tell for sure if I’m Jewish? Because family records only go back so far; how can one prove that they are either a descendent through strictly maternal line from Jacob, or else that one of one’s ancestors had a halachically valid conversion?
So you can’t define it precisely. And yet, the definition is simple, and it very clearly excludes some people. Are you willing to abandon the simplistic notion that one can define cultures precisely and simply? Or are you going to claim that all cultures are comprised of those who say they are a part of them? Where does that leave, say, ethnic groups and religions that don’t admit outsiders? Can I magically declare myself a member of a group and have it count for something? What happens when they don’t let me in? Or does your simplistic definition only apply to the term “African-American”? If so, why are you defining terms so as to make that one in particular useless, while respecting the real definitions of other terms?
But who gets to define “commonly” or “average american”? If we found out CT’s great-great grandmother was Zulu, would she suddenly be AA? What about if her GGGM was only adopted by the Zulu tribe?* But like you said- she really doesn’t self-identify herself as AA, so that’s fine by me. If she did, I’d say “Ok, it’s her choice” and let it go.
My point is that racial terms must be entirely a matter of self-identification. Although you say most Americans would agree that Obama is AA- but **Askia ** said “Barack Obama is not African-American.” So, now what do we do? Take a poll? Who gets included in the Poll? Who is an “American” (a citizen, or just a resident?)? What I am saying is that the poll has already been taken, and that poll can only consist of one person and one person only- Sen Obama. If “most americans”, or Askia, or anyone else disagree or agree, I don’t give a rats-ass.
- This isn’t a silly argument, as in some American native tribes, Tribal law accepts those adopted into the Tribe as full members of that tribe, which then legally qualifies them as Members. My Dad was adopted by the Innuit, in a tribal ceremony. If that tribe of the Innuit recognized said adoption as making my Father a legal member of that tribe (they don’t, btw) then I’d be an Innuit- legally, under Federal law, even if I don’t “look” like an Eskimo.
(Groan.) I thought I was through with this thread.
DrDeth. … look. You are who you say to are to an extent. When it comes to race and ethnicity, most people cannot stray too far from social conventions of identity. America is not THAT different from anywhere else in that regard.
Individuals can sometimes get away with self-labelling to include themselves in a given subgroup in a way whole population groups simply cannot and do not. Mexicans and Candadians both live in North America, but it would be silly to the extreme (right now, in this point in history, before the emergence of the proposed American Union comes about) to refer to their citizens as Americans since 1) they already have their own national/ethnic identities and 2) the people of the United States are already using the term “Americans.” But that’s precisely what people do when they use the term *African-American * literally and indiscriminately to refer to all blacks in America as being part of the historically distinct ethnic black population. African immigrants are not African Americans except literally. Mmmmaybe after the third generation or so they’ll consider themselves such, but if they still carry names like Kod Igwe or Yorkoo Malawi Karanga (and that was their surname going back generations) I doubt it.
I really don’t see why this is so controversial or how it’s difficult for people to grasp.
So again, I ask you, would I be a white person simply by saying I’m white?
Would a black man in the Jim Crow era been allowed to sit in the front of the bus by telling the bus driver that he’s white?
Can you answer me that?
So now you are feigning ignorance of what an American is? You might as well be asking what it means to be a human being, because your thought process leads to silly questions like that.
Who gets to decide who is human and who is not, huh? If a chimpazee says they are human, then gee, I guess we gotta take its word for it. Right? Right?
Interestingly, I heard of an experiment done with one of those apes who learned “sign language”; it was probably Koko the gorilla but I’m not positive. At any rate, she was given a stack of photos of people and gorillas, and asked to sort them into piles; she did the task perfectly, except she sorted herself into the human pile.
Thus, she is a human.
You look at informed sources, like a freakin’ dictionary. Or some of the other cites I’ve given. What’s your source-- a joke on SNL?
If we were discussing the term “Native Americna” , then that would be of interest, But we’re not, and so it isn’t.
I have done so: self-identification except where that conflicts with a legal determination.
Why is Askia’s opinion any better than your? Or mine? Because Askia has *self-identified * as being a member of an ethnic group? Have you met Askia? Do you agree with Askia’s self-determination- or are you simply willing to accept it- as I am?
If you like. Now, don’t claim you have been Baptized or Confirmed into the Roman Catholic Church unless you really have been. But if you want to say you’re Catholic, go ahead.
Indeed, you bring up an excellent illustration- what is a Jew? Is there really a “simple definition of Judaism”? How about conversions? (Even Orthodox Rabbi’s accept Conversions, but they don’t accept Reform Conversions!) How about Reform? How about those who have converted to another faith? Not so simple anymore, eh?
Perfect example of a cultural and ethnic self-identity overriding one’s ancestry and heritage. I’m sure the human consensus is that Koko would be too far outside the social convention of what it means to be “human.” She might be too far outside the social convention of what it means to be a gorilla, to other gorillas.
This was interesting. You have a cite for this Excalibre?
Actually, Mexicans, Canadians and South Americans can do call themselves Americans and even claim that those from the USA are arrogant when we say WE are the only Americans.
Sez who? John Mace here disagrees with you. So does Sen Obama. And, that’s what really counts.
If you ask me who I agree with more, it’s Askia, not you. **Askia **wants to make the definition more selective, and therefore more precise. Nothing wrong iwth that, except he’s swimiing against the current on that one. You want to make the defintion so overly broad that it means absolutely nothing at all.
Besides, I think **Askia **has already stated he has no problem including Obama in the definition of A-A if Obama self-identifies as such.
Your source defines it as "A Black American of African ancestry. " That source does not define Black, American, African (do we include nations above the Sahara?) or ancestry as given in that context.
Let’s see- it defines Black as :*often Black
A member of a racial group having brown to black skin, especially one of African origin.
An American descended from peoples of African origin having brown to black skin; an African American. * Which would include Egytpians and various Semitic nomads? How about Charlize Theron with a good tan?
In fact it defines African as "*Of or relating to Africa or its peoples, languages, or cultures.
n.
A native or inhabitant of Africa.
A person of African descent. " *
Which *does * include dudes from North of the Sahara, right?
It defines American as "Of or relating to the United States of America or its people, language, or culture.
Of or relating to North or South America, the West Indies, or the Western Hemisphere.
Of or relating to any of the Native American peoples.
Indigenous to North or South America. Used of plants and animals.
n.
A native or inhabitant of America.
A citizen of the United States. "
Which includes all of North & South America, and those who are both Citizens or simply “inhabitants.”
And, it’s definitions of “ancestry” has no limitations on numbers of generations, thus we are ALL of “African ancestry”.
Not so useful after all, eh?
No. It’s better because he’s put a great deal of thought into the issue and put forth an interesting and insightful argument, even if not everyone agrees with it.
I haven’t met anyone here. Anyone could easily be lying about their identity on the SDMB. In fact, one white boy claimed to be a transgendered Asian - and was kicked off the boards for it! (Apparently, the mods don’t operate by your rather nonsensical standards.)
I’m not inclined to accuse Askia of such things without evidence. The idea that this constitutes some sort of tacit acceptance that being black is nothing more than self-identification is plainly false.
There is indeed. If your mother is Jewish, or you had a halachically-valid conversion, you are Jewish.
And despite the simple definition, it’s not a simple matter. (Congratulations for picking up on that, but I’m not quite sure why you’re presenting that as something you thought up, since it was the basis of my example.) And yet, despite all that, the definition still excludes many people! Different Jewish groups don’t agree on exactly who is and who isn’t a Jew - but all agree that there are many people who aren’t, and further, they agree on most of those people.
Whose legal intepretation? Did you know that the Israeli government requires an Orthodox conversion to accept someone as a Jew? Does that make that the “legal determination” that is magically binding? If an American Indian who legally belongs to a tribe travels to another country with no special legal status for that tribe, do they stop being a member for their stay in that country? What if they immigrate to that new country?
What is clearly seen here is that even though the definition of Judaism is simple, it entails a lot of incredibly complex things. You could define the group instead by self-identification, and thus make it simpler yet, but once again you would end up with a definition at variance with how people actually use the term, and one that isn’t useful since suddenly it becomes nothing more than a club that a person can enter or leave at will.
Why do you pretend that self-identification is some simple binary state anyway? When Oprah self-identified as Zulu, did that make her Zulu? When residents of Boston dressed as Indians and dumped tea into Boston Harbor, did they suddenly become Indians and then stop being them? What about someone who deliberately dissimulates? Did African-Americans in the Jim Crow era who were able to “pass” magically become white when they did so?
The map is not the territory, DrDeth. The definition is not the same as the thing defined. You’ve proven quite well that one can create a definition with no real meaning or value. The leap you’re stubbornly refusing to make is recognizing that this is evidence that trying to come up with a one-sentence definition of any cultural descriptor is ultimately going to fail. This is a complex topic, DrDeth. Why in the world would you assume that one line of text could possibly sum this up? When your closest definition allows people who clearly are not African-American to claim that they are African-American, why do you cling to your definition and pretend that a definition equals the thing being defined? Why not admit that your definition is too simple? After all, what do we accomplish by defining “African-American” that way, except to say that it’s no longer safe to even guess whether someone is African-American without interrogating them? What does your definition accomplish?
It doesn’t accomplish anything. That’s the problem. Your entire argument rests upon assumptions that you seem to be completely unwilling to examine: namely, that a simple definition of an ethnic or cultural group can be arrived at, and that when faced with two definitions, we must go with the simpler, even when that means defining people as members or non-members of a group in a way that’s at variance with what everyone else in society would agree with. Aside from the abuse you’ve heaped upon poor Occam’s Razor, you’re demonstrating a stubborn refusal to question the assumptions you’re operating under - all you have for an argument is your assertion that your definition is correct. It’s lazy and it demonstrates that you are not open to discussing this issue honestly.
(Fuck, how do I keep getting drawn back into this stupid thread?)