I’ll admit that after looking into this further, I was not aware of the history of the term, and had assumed things about it that are not true. I did not know that Jesse Jackson practically invented the term (I was 7 then, for all I knew it was in common use before that). I still contend, however, that anyone from Africa that moves to American might consider themselves African-American, because that’s how words are constructed. That said word was purposely constructed to mean something less inclusive than it means for a term like Polish-American is just a potential cause of confusion, at very least on my part.
Except they very much don’t, generally. Because they know what the word means, or learn very quickly.
As has been expounded upon in several recent posts, in the United States, the term African American sometimes denotes a narrowly-defined subset of Black people. If both terms are equally acceptable, then use of both terms could promote more precise writing. One could use the term “all Black people” if they wanted to make it clear that they were not limiting their statement(s) to just African Americans.
Back to the OP. Has anyone seen anything recently that suggests either term is falling out of favor or beginning to be perceived as offensive to a significant number of people in the United States? (I said significant number because there seems to always be at least one person that is offended by something no matter what it is.)
Off topic a little bit but it might lead to some knowledge about acceptable racial terminology in the United States: Is there or has there been similar issues in Canada?
My impression is that Black is gaining favor where for awhile it was a bit shied away from (which is why we got weirdness like folks mistakenly calling any black person an African-American, regardless whether they were African or American.)
This is no more an argument than insisting that antisemitic means being prejudiced against all Arabic peoples instead of a word deliberately constructed to indicate prejudice against Jews. No knowledgeable English speaker could ever construe African-American to mean a person of any race with ancestry anywhere in Africa. The broader, literal, usage of either term is restricted to people making an ideological point or the seriously ignorant.
Yes, the rise of the term BIPOC I mentioned above is quite recent. So is the trend toward capitalizing Black, because it is now the favored term replacing African-American in many publications.
Well, since those people use the term to refer to themselves and evidently do not seem to have issues with others referring to the dominant population as white, I’d have to go with: yes.
Right. Sorry about that, Velocity.
A post was merged into an existing topic: Grundig Posts
For what it’s worth, I once knew a (white) fellow from South Africa who did, in fact, describe himself as “African-American”. I’m not sure I would call that a typical usage, though, because that particular fellow wasn’t typical in any way.
Contrary people will be contrary. I knew an aging white Rhodesian ex-pat who used to (rather belligerently) make the same argument. In his particular case though he did it because was an asshole as well as contrary 
.
Not all blacks are from Africa so I say blacks.