It’s not much of issue, I believe, because the number of recent immigrants from Africa pales (pardon the pun) in comparison to descendants of slaves. If there were lots and lots of the former, then I suspect we’d be having this discussion more often. It did come up quite a bit when Obama burst on the scene, but not so much since then.
Yeah, I remember it being an issue especially back then, given Alan Keyes’s remarks on the subject. Here’s an article regarding the debate. And here’s another article on the debate which also mentions Keyes’s remark. This clearly to me shows that this isn’t some completely uncommon esoteric discussion.
So those black Americans who descended from slaves and whose ancestors didn’t live in Africa for many generations are African Americans, and someone who emigrates from Africa and becomes a citizen of the US is not – we have a crazy language.
Yes, language is odd. A lot of times, from what I have seen in my sample pool, people who have immigrated recently from African countries and naturalized will self-identify as country of origin-Americans, so, say “Kenyan-Americans” or “Ethiopian-Americans.” I just go by whatever people self-identify as, as this can be a touchy subject.
I wish we had a term, basically equivalent to “Latino,” for the complex of New World blended ethnicity which is demarcated by visible African heritage, but shaded with Anglo, Native, and Hispanic ancestry. “Black” could be it, except that is typically understood to include Africans of exclusively African ancestry too, and sometimes various other dark-toned peoples, as in Australia. “African-American” could be it, except the “American” part is typically understood to refer to the United States only; Jamaicans and Brazilians and so on aren’t “American” anything, as a rule.
My family is Irish/German/Swiss-American.
My brother married a white South African woman. They have two sons.
My sister married a black Guyanan. They have a son and a daughter.
I tell people that my brother’s kids are white African-Americans, while my sister’s are black Irish-Americans.
[Note. This is intended as an ironic commentary on the vagaries of language, not on the proper use of the term “African-American.”]
Mainly because “Africa” isn’a a country, but for most descendants of slaves, that’s all they know about their ancestry. They don’t know which country they came from. A recent immigrant does.
But again, there is a debate about what the term should mean, and whether there is a need to differentiate the two groups. Personally, I’m a lumper, so I generally don’t make a distinction. But if someone insists on being called “X”, then I usually don’t fight it.
I peruse genealogical databases looking for interesting connections(*), but find very few lines from African-American slaves to famous white Americans. Among Presidents, only Obama (via his mother) shows up as descended from an African-American. And I think Michelle is the only First Lady showing descent from slaves. (Of course, many genealogies don’t go back far, and “uncomfortable” descents may be suppressed.)
(* – Yes, it’s silly, but not more so than stamp-collecting … and my wife prefers it over frequenting strip clubs as a hobby for me. 
)
Descent from Native Americans is often claimed but, again, few show up in the better databases, mostly from marriages between very early colonists and Algonquins. Vice Presidents Hamlin, Dawes and Quayle, First Lady Ladybird, Bing Crosby and Liz Taylor show descent from daughters of Chief Quadequina, who befriended the Pilgrims. Several famous Americans show descent from Pocahontas, including LBJ, First Lady Edith Bolling Wilson, and the explorers Richard Byrd and William Clark; or from Pocahontas’ sister, including Obama and Jefferson Davis. Vice President Curtis also had Algonquin blood. The only famous American with non-Algonquin Native American blood that comes to mind is Angelina Jolie, whose 8-gt grandmother was born in a Huron village.
Detecting such an ancestry by testing autosomal DNA isn’t practical beyond a few generations. But purely patrilineal or purely uterine ancestries can be traced back thousands of generations. Thomas Jefferson’s rarish T-haplogroup suggests, in some speculations, descent from Phoenicians. Prince William, heir to the throne of Britain is of a very rare South Indian mitochondrial DNA haplogroup – Lady Di’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother was born in India to a Scottish representative of the East India Company and his native housekeeper/mistress.
If anyone knows other interesting genealogical connections to famous Americans please PM me!
The relative paucity of confirmed lines suggests to me that social barriers to mating are stronger than often assumed. Even the housekeeper who gave Prince William his mtDNA had highish status – her father was Armenian.
What to call someone’s ancestry is rather problematic. For instance, if asked whether Charlize Theron is African-American, some would say she is, since she and her ancestors several generations back were born in Africa. I and some others would say that she isn’t, since her ancestors before 1600 all lived in Europe (the Netherlands, France, and Germany, apparently). I suspect that she grew up thinking of herself as an Afrikaner, which means that she didn’t think of herself as a native-ancestry African but as someone of mostly Dutch ancestry who spoke Afrikaans (which you can think of as either a language close to Dutch or as a highly dialectical version of Dutch).
Some (including me) would say that an African-American is an American whose ancestors lived in Sub-Saharan Africa as far back as can be determined (and thus is presumably black). I think that it works better if you look at one’s ancestry as far back as you can go. So, for instance, my brother’s wife was born in Vietnam, but her parents had moved there from China only a few years before her birth. I think of her as being Chinese-American, the two sons of her and my brother as being of Chinese, German, English, and Swiss ancestry (since my brother is, as am I of course, of German, English, and Swiss ancestry) and thus being Chinese-German-English-Swiss-Americans (if you had to make up a term for it), and the grandson and granddaughter of her and my brother as being of Chinese, German, English, Swiss, and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry (since their mother is of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry). You can make up your own term for that.
Yeah, yeah, so really we really say that someone is an African-American if a large proportion of their ancestors lived in Sub-Saharan African as far back as can be determined. What “a large proportion” is really more determined by the color of their skin than anything else. This mostly means that all of these terms are vague and not precisely defined.
I can go with that.
There are so many Americans with some Cherokee heritage that there must be some famous ones. Those who immediately come to mind are:
Elizabeth Warren
Burt Reynolds
Will Rogers
Loretta Lynn
According to wikipedia, only Will Rogers is documented.
And, of course, Jim Thorpe was part Sac and Fox.
Further, pretty much anyone of Mexican (mestizo) descent is going to be part Native American, but not Algonquian (e.g., Eva Longoria who is part Mayan).
The ‘one drop’ rule is an assinine metric for anything, especially given the inarguable fact that everyone has ‘one drop’ (or more like one bucket) of African ancestry.
I propose that we elect to the presidency the following in any order: a Chinaman, a Polock, a Jew broad, a Pakistani cab driver, a queer barber, a Mexi-Can, a Caribbean dancer, and Kate McKinnon so we can knock out all of our ‘firsts’ and get onto trying to elect our “best”…which would obviously be Bill Murray, but he’s getting older by the minute, so we’d better hurry up with it.
Stranger
The metric of “President Obama is not an African-American” is mostly used by those who think African-Americans (at least partly) descended from slaves should feel no pride in seeing a non-white president.
Somehow, many of them do feel proud.
This being GQ, you have a cite for that, right?
We have a language that decided we should call descendants of slaves “African-Americans” after calling them other things, and then someone realized that Africans who moved here voluntarily, not as slaves, qualify too, but then the meaning was blurred, so they had to talk about it even more and make up new distinctions, etc. It’s dumb.
Obama is also not a True Scotsman.
Emphasis added. It’s the nature of human language, which is one of our most defining characteristics as a species and certainly one of the major keys to our success as a species.
The answer is almost certainly not. The ones who are usually brought forward as possibilities are Jefferson and Jackson because of opponents political slurs. However, Jeffersons mothers was born in England and both of Jackson’s parents were Irish immigrants. Lincoln beccause of his supposed dark complexion and political views but all of his grandparents were known to be white. Harding had rumors about him but recent DNA evidence rules him out. Coolidge’s mother’s maiden name was Moor, but that is also a common English and Irish name and her family was known in Vermont for over a hundred years. Eisenhower’s mother supposedly looked mulatto but her parents were both known to be white.