Apparently the answer is “no” in Omaha, Nebraska.
The brief on this is that a white kid at a high school and his friends were suspended because they put up posters advocating his consideration for the award. It is traditionally given to a black student. He is white. He is also from South Africa. So, is he not African enough just because he is white and not black?
Discuss!
African-American is a bad description for group they want to honor. Pretty sure all Americans are African-American, it just a matter of timing.
There is an active Pit Thread on this subject. I won’t repeat here what I said there other than to say this is a stupid award that should be abolished because it seperates students into racial categories for no apparent reason.
I guess that technically he could qualify for the award, since he is technically an African-American, albeit a white one. However, despite the ambigiuous wording, I think that the award is geared specifically towards black African-Americans. Since so often people in the United States think that “African-American” is synonomous with “black” and rarely take the word literally to mean “anyone who originally hails from Africa but who is now a United States citizen”.
That said, I think it was in poor taste to plaster those posters around school on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a day for remembering the black struggle for civil rights that continues to this day. I really don’t blame the black student they quoted in the article for being upset by it. I would probably have to see one of the posters to make a more definitive judgement, but since the article doesn’t mention specific content on the poster, I can only guess what might have been printed on them. It almost sounds as if the people who started it were playing some dumb prank or something, and I can’t help but wonder if that was the intent or if it truely was a sincere, if untastefully-executed attempt to try to be awarded that scholarship.
Actually, the article did mention that the poster depicted the kid giving a thumbs-up with text to the effect of “Vote for me!”
I hardly think that it’s offensive. Sure, they could have picked a better day, but that’s immaterial.
They used the term “African-American” for the award. He is quite literally an African-American. He should definitly not have been suspended. If they mean only black kids can get an award, they should call it the Distinguished Black Student Award.
The term African-American was given currency specifically to provide a name that would allow blacks to use a term of self-identification that more nearly resembled that of the Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans, etc. among whom they lived in the Rust Belt of the U.S. As such, it has a clear meaning of “descended from imported African slaves.” It is not a really good choice of terms, given that many people in the U.S. are not used to the “hyphenated-American” terminology common in the ethnic enclaves of the Rust Belt and given the ease with which it creates a awkward usages such as when a reporter is reputed to have idenified Nelson Mandela as the “first African-American president of South Africa.” However, the word African was chosen specifically because it is difficult for any descendant of slaves to identify which nation gave birth to their ancestors (given that many of the current nations did not then exist and given the deliberate way in which records of their ethnic origins were destroyed).
With the manner in which and the purpose for which African-American was selected, it is clear that Trevor is not an “African-American” in the current usage; he is a South African-American since we can clearly identify the nation from which he immigrated.
Now Trevor and his buddies might have been protesting the term (although I suspect that they were just puliing a prank). But despite the difficulties and awkwardness of the term “African-American,” it has a meaning and it does not apply to Trevor.
That said, the more serious issue in the story is the one indicated by John Mace: why is this school singling out anyone to be the “distinguished African-American” student in the first place? The whole award is so bad on several levels.
If Trevor and his buddies were protesting the award, itself, they might have been acting in good faith, (they have made no statement that that was their intent), but they were still pretty dumb in the way they carried it out.