Tribal men? And I say to thee, verily, the best surgeons in all the land would have been required to tend to my busted gut. 
Out of curiosity, what, if anything, did she suggest that Black women call themselves? Or non-Black folks, for that matter?
See, this is one of those times when I roll my eyes (all the way to the back of my head) at white liberals (who, nuances aside, I tend to like). And, FWIW, I totally believe that you aren’t making this up.
Yep, I could see this happening.
That’s exactly what I’m trying to find out. No one has ever told me they were offended by “black”, but given that “African-American” is (a) awkward, and (b) actually less usefully descriptive in most relevant situations, I figured there ought to be some strong reason to be using it, that presumably being a fair number of people who actively are offended/bothered by “black”.
If any individual asked me to refer to them as “African-American” instead of “black”, I most likely would, but that’s never come up.
Yeah, I’ve seen this a couple of times.
Me: What are you doing tonight?
Some person: I’m meeting up with Audrey to work on my music final.
Me: Which one is Audrey?
SP: She’s, um… [Can’t… say she’s… black! They’ll think I’m racist for drawing attention to her race! Jesse Jackson will hold marches outside my room and people will demonstrate against me, and people won’t talk to me, and…] short?
Me: [having long since figured out that Audrey is black] I’m going to go think about the state of race relations in America, then jump off a bridge. See you later.
What’s the difference, they’re all n…
…ot from Africa.
What? 
I have mentioned this on the boards before, but one woman I know hates being called African American - as she explained it, she was born and raised in Panama, is not an American citizen (but legally here with green card) and to the best of her knowledge, there is no direct lineage to Africa in her family tree of several generations. The term African American doesn’t fit her one iota.
What’s awkward about it?
A Black person whom you know is from the US is an African American. If you’re describing the guy who cut you off on the highway, or the lady who waves at you every morning across the street, I think Black is the best descriptor. If you say “African American” there’s no way to really confirm this, but I think most people will get what you mean.
For me, I like African American for a few reasons. First, all of the images of Africa I learned or can recall from school were about half-naked people starving to death. When I went to college and enrolled in a few African Studies courses, I came to learn of the great civilizations of West Africa such as Ghana and the institutes of higher learning, like the University of Timbuktu, I really felt as if I’d been lied to and the historical facts that would make me proud as a kid were denied to me… as we learned about another obscure French king or something or other in history class. Now obviously, the diaspora makes it fairly unlikely that I will ever precisely know where my ancestors in Africa came from. African American highlights that confusion and is unique to those descended from slaves in the Americas. (I’ve heard Afro-Canadian and Afro-Brazilian, for instance). Someone who has a parent or grandparent will likely have a national or clan identity they can link to.
I also like the fact that African American connects me to land, which is something that Africans who came to Americas as slaves were always denied. I’d like to think that one or more of my ancestors hoped that many generations later, their descendants would not forget their heritage and where they originated from. For now, African American is the best I can do to fulfill that dream.
Finally I like the fact that African American is always capitalized. A heritage and a people should always be capitalized… and if you read my posts I always capitalize Black for that reason.
Having said all of that, I’m not at all bothered by the use of the word “Black” to describe me. It suggests a solidarity among dark-skinned people in the world and also hearkens back to a time when there was a strong political identity affiliated with the term. I think it’s cool.
I get you, Li’l Pluck. I’ve actually know a few Black Jews (as well as Latino) which is why I said if a White Jewish person would rather focus on his Jewish heritage than being White, I’ll accommodate - though I think this tacitly says “White” in his mind. (Knowing the guy I’m thinking about, I think he’d think Jewish=White.)
Agreed. The Black South Africans I’ve known have described themselves as Black or have a clan identity. The guy I’m referring to looks South Asian more than anything. He’s quite secure and proud in his colored, South African identity so I never asked him where his folks came from before then.
In my immediate experience I’ve only heard the term African-American used by politicians, talk-show radio hosts, and concerned liberals. Also, it’s not so much that it’s akward, but to my ear the phrase occasionally comes out sounding like “afercern merkins” especially when said by President Bush.
That it’s seven syllables long. More than that, it’s seven syllables that just don’t flow off the tongue.
Risking sounding like an insensitive twit here, but… why does it matter what people who were in the same region of the world as your direct ancestors, and presumably looked a lot like your direct ancestors, but were not necessarily your direct ancestors, were doing 500 years ago? I mean, I see the value of knowing what you know as a combat to some racist who starts going on and on about what white people have accomplished and what black people have NOT accomplished. On the other hand, should modern day descendants of Eskimos or coastal Californian native Americans or Australian Aboriginies feel inferior because their “ancestors” happened not to ever build big stone cities?
So would it be correct to sum your view up as follows: you appreciate the term “African-American” when applied to a particular cultural group, namely, Americans who are descended from black slaves in America; but you also don’t object to the term “black” as a racial/ethnic/physical-appearance term?
This is a real conversation I had on the phone the other day. Note that I work in a flooring store with two coworkers. One coworker is an obese pale Jewish guy and the other guy is a thin dark-skinned Ghanian. In case you didn’t know, I’m female.
<ring ring>
Me: Good afternoon, Joe’s Floor Hut.*
Caller: I was in yesterday. I wanted to ask the guy who helped me about something.
Me: Sure. Who was helping you?
Caller: I don’t remember his name.
Me: Okay–was it a white guy or a black guy?
Caller: <long pause> Uhhhh…he had dark hair.
Me: Let’s try this again. Was it a white guy or a black guy?
Caller: Uhhh…
Me: Was it a fat guy or a skinny guy?
Caller: It was a white guy.
:rolleyes:
Hey! Wait a minute! Who are you calling white… I am not white… I am a Russian Pink-to-Tan-to-Taupe Calico-American! 
I kind of like the term Calico-American… Conjures up some great mental images…
Charlize Theron
Date of birth (location)
7 August 1975
Benoni, Gauteng, South Africa
Ergo, Charlize is African American and NOT black.
An SNL skit from several years ago made the same point, although I doubt they were the first to do it. She’s actually not a citizen, although I’ve read that she has applied for it, so she might be better described as a South African living in America.
Not this old chestnut again!
Charlize Theron has a national identity - South African. So if she has become an American citizen, she’d be South African American. Just like Arnie is Swiss American. I’ve never heard Theron make this claim for herself, just by folks attempting to show the “inadequacy” of the term African American. (BTW, I’ve seen it with Dave Matthews as well.)
African American is an appellation chosen by Black Americans to signify their connection with the African diaspora. It also signifies the lack of specificity that most Black Americans have
Oh, I know, let me try one!
Fidel Castro
Place of birth: Cuba, which is part of the North American continent
Ergo, Castro is American.
Well… do you have the same question for anyone who talks about their pride in the accomplishments of Italian Americans not related to them? Or with the accomplishments of women? It doesn’t have anything to do with combating the words of racists; it has to do with a sense of possibility and accomplishment of people with whom one shares a cultural identity.
I’m assuming you’re a White male, Max - please correct me if I’m wrong. So if you sat next to me in kindergarten when my teacher pointed to the picture of the American presidents and said, “Children, any of you can become president one day,” it might not have caused any cognitive dissonance to you, but it did for me. Not one was Black or looked like someone in my family. I suspect the girls in the class might have had the same feeling.
Or doing a heraldry project in fourth grade, tracing the origins of my name to Central England - and being fairly certain that nobody directly in my tree came from there, while many of my White peers could talk about where their ancestors came from in Europe and stick a pin in the map. That was a pretty shitty day, sticking a pin in the middle of England, knowing that’s not really where my folks came from. (Hell, maybe some of them did… there are some really light-skinned folks in my family.)
I’ve discussed this with a Native American friend - in school, the history book usually mentions Black or Red people when they’re getting the shaft. So we’re always losing a war, getting captured or enslaved, starving, strung out on drugs and alcohol. So when I learned who Garrett Morgan was, I read all the books I could read about him. When I learned that Benjamin Banneker more or less designed the street layout of Washington, DC, I told everyone in my class. Because for once, people like me accomplished something of enormous significance. It did wonders for my self-esteem and my confidence… and I saw the exact same thing happen in my completely Black fourth-grade class as a teacher.
And as I’ve said before, Africa was always an embarrassment in history and social studies. Africans are poor, they don’t wear clothes, they’re all starving - that’s all I learned in K-12 about the continent - if we even got around to studying it at all. I know an amazing amount about Western Europe and Japan but virtually nothing about an entire continent. I took an African Studies course in college and blew it off, more or less because I thought I had some magical knowledge of Africa due to my Blackness. After the first “D” I got the message. I studied, read, and learned - from a White prof, nonetheless - about pre-colonial Africa, great civilizations, the essential looting of a continent via colonialism, chattel slavery, genocide (read about the exploits of Leopold II in the Congo - the most extreme estimates have him above Hitler and Pol Pot and in the company of Stalin). So the images of Africa I saw made more sense, and then learning about how Africans prospered before, during, and after the colonial period taught me to respect the continent and the people from whom I am descended. (And yes, I know, as a Black American with a Jamaican parent, I’m probably more European than a lot of White people here!)
The reality is that many people of color who come from a heritage that has been disrespected or eradicated by White Europeans (let’s be honest here - in the examples of Native Americans and Aborigines, that’s who did it) do feel a sense of inadequacy and shame because history books are full of stories of how the savages were scratching their asses and eating each other until the missionaries came along and taught them how to read the Bible. When you have an opportunity to learn about what cultures and traditions existed before the Europeans - the systems of trade, the education - and perhaps as importantly, what native people did better than Europeans (things like equal rights for women, an openness and acceptance of homosexuality, a healthy respect for the environment) - it does wonders for your self-esteem and the sense of possibility. I could say more but that’s enough for now… hope this answers your question.
Interesting, especially in light of its history.
At the time that the black community sought to have the word black replace the word Negro in newspapers and other periodicals, the specific argument put forth was that when a paper mentioned people of European descent, it used the lower-case descriptive term “white,” but when it identified people of African ancestry, it used the quasi-scientific term, capitlaized, Negro. One argument was that Negro implied that the people so identified were simply the targets of scientific categorization while the descriptor white simply mentioned an identifying characteristic of folks. The push for “black” was to put all groups on a more nearly equal footing.
As far as I have seen, European-descended folks still get the label (lowercase) “white.”
There is no- repeat NO- name for any “race” that some member of that race doesn’t take umbrage at.
True, “Black” doesn’t seem to have any large numbder of Black dudes offended at it, but I have met a couple. (“I am not Black, my skin color is dark brown, not black!”)
Interesting post, tom… I didn’t know that. The APA 5th Edition stylebook just says that you need to be consistent - if you cap Black you should cap White as well. When I worked as an editor for an academic journal, our stylebook mandated the caps of ethnic and cultural groups. Someone once argued that while he agreed there was a Black culture, he didn’t think there was a White culture to speak of.
I also locate my use of Black to the Black Power movement of the later 60s and early 70s. Black to me is not simply a phenotypic descriptor, it’s a political identity.
That made for an interesting editorial board meeting. Miss those days…
Word. That goes for White folks as well. I think there’s an unspoken assumption that only people of color have preferred nomenclature for their racial or ethnic identity.