And then Louis Farrakhan used the term “African-American” zero times in his speech to the Million Man March in 1995.
This is so true. So entirely true. I used to work with two count’em two DABFA’s (diplomates of the American Board of forensic anthropology, than which there are less than three hundred in the US at my last count). I loved looking over their shoulders at their work, and went so far as to take a little week-long course and buy the books. I am still the proud possessor of the great (and weird) J.Stanley Rhine’s book on how you tell different races apart by looking at the skeleton and skull. The kicker is this: according to the bones, there are only three races. Negroid, Caucasoid, Asian. Negroid covers all the many thousand sub-types of African origin (no Boers) even though DNA would tell us they are farther apart in many cases than any given example of a Caucasoid and an Asian. Asian covers all the American Indians as well as the whole China - Malaysia - Cambodia - Japan - Korea group: apparently it’s nearly impossible to tell a pure Amerind skull from a pure Vietnamese skull. Land bridge to Siberia and all y’know.
Now it is very easy to tell apart straight examples of these three races, so easy that after a little training I could do it; but in America, you just don’t get very many who aren’t mixtures. A cool thing that I always loved about the pure Negroid skull was that the brain case is carried sort of behind as well as above the face, where the pure Caucasoid brain case is directly above the face. Think of that classic enamel bust of Queen Nefertiti. A pencil laid downwards along the forehead misses the chin by a wide angle. On contrast, you lay a pencil on my forehead and it goes straight to my chin. Any African-American whose forehead is in a straight line above his chin is at least thirty percent white.
One of the jobs of the DABFAs in the morgue was to take a skeleton found in the woods or under the floor of a house, and tell us gender, height, rough age, and if they could, race, so we could hunt for a missing person. The hard part was race. Because it required knowing not only what the bones would tell you about the race, but what the neighbors would prolly have thought the race was. To be rude, they were both cracker experts.
Now if you take a man who is 40% Negroid, 40% Caucasoid, and 20% Asian through the Amerinds, if he speaks Spanish, eats refried beans and tortillas, and has relatives in Mexico or the Caribbean, you would have no hesitation in calling him Hispanic. And if he eats greens and salt pork, speaks English with a Southern accent, and has relatives in Mississippi and Alabama, you would have no hesitation in calling him black or African-American. The cute thing is everybody in the biz agrees that Hispanic isn’t a race, down to having check boxes after “white” or “black” on the death certificate so you can check off “Hispanic or not”. But nobody seems to have noticed that black, in America, isn’t a race either.
Talk about your social constructs.
Actually I met one. Forget her name but she was a black (and/or African-American) secretary in my residency office. I was going over a form and she asked me whether I used black (or as some people put it, Black) or African-American. I turned deferential and asked her what I should do. She took some thought about it but she came down hard on the African-American side. Following that I was afraid to put Black for a couple of years although it is so much quicker to write.
I notice that the cops in my area have started writing either B or AA on police reports, in the context “80 y/o BF”. The older ones all write B. The younger ones are divided. Most of the hospital reports use AA.
I think the change is because neutral terms for a subset of people who have been derogated can become derogatory over the years, and people from that subset feel the need for a new, completely non-derogatory term which they started, possess, and own, which does not belong to their derogaters. At least that was the vague impression I gathered in my woolly way off the secretary.
Think “Spic” which was once merely a contraction of “Hispanic” - now completely insulting. So now it’s Latino/a. Or La Raza, which is really funny.
Here’s one cite that references the OED with a different origin:
"Spic
Many believe that this derogatory term for a person of Latin American descent is a clipping of Hispanic. While this appears plausible on its face, it is not correct. Use of the term Hispanic to refer to a person of Latin American descent, especially one living in the United States, only dates to the early 1970s. The epithet spic, on the other hand, dates to the early days of the 20th century.
So if it did not come from Hispanic, where did it come from? Spic is a clipping of the adjective spiggoty which was applied to immigrants from Central and South America because they did not “spiggoty English” (speak the English). The term probably arose among Americans in Panama during the building of the canal. The abbreviated spic was in use by 1913.
The earliest known use of spiggoty is in the 14 March 1908 issue of the Saturday Evening Post:
All Americans are alike. They do not bother to learn foreign languages when they go to a foreign country, but they force the natives to learn American. So, when the Panamanians presented themselves, if the could talk English, they prefaced their attempts to cheat the Americans out of something–it really made little difference what–with the statement, accompanied by eloquent gestures: “Spik d’ English.” If they couldn’t they said: “No spik d’ English.” One or the other was the universal opening of conversation, and those early Americans soon classed the whole race of men who could or could not “Spik d’ Eng.” as “Spikities,” and from that grew the harmonious and descriptive Spigotty.
(Sources: OED2, ADS-L) "
Pardon me, here’s the corrected link (scroll down): http://www.wordorigins.org/wordors.htm
I once had a girl in class who made a complete scene, infuriated and embarrassed an extraordinarily nice teacher. She took offense at black, negro, african-american and ultimately, insisted the teacher refer to her as “pecan tan.”
I’m now 38, at that time I was in the 7th grade. I’ll never forget that girl, or the teacher.
Racism is an abomination. Abusing someone by trying to make them look like a racist is sad.
I find african-american awkward and ungainly. I’m in the south and outside of personel offices, I don’t ever hear it. Black is far more common. We have a family friend from Nigeria, he’s about the blackest person I’ve ever seen. He thinks african-american as a phrase, is stupid.
Gabriela,
I absolutely adore your posts. The skull distinction was very interesting. Now I’ll have something fun to do at work tomorrow, other than listen to bad beat stories and hear bad jokes.
I will point out that I spent my entire life being told I had “a butt like a sistah” or “a surprisingly nice butt for a white girl.” etc. Perhaps you are looking at the wrong end to distinguish race? 
FWIW, I’m about as pale as a white girl can get, red hair, freckles, but from the back or side, you can tell I’m probably not as pure white as my skin would have you believe. (Thanks ancestors!)
I’m a black person who only rarely refers to herself as AA. “Black” is no more or less accurate than “AA” (I’m not literally black, just as I’m not literally from Africa"), but I prefer the term because of it’s widespread usage (also, I don’t want to risk getting :rolleyes: by using a term that offends the patriotic…you know, those folks who have no problem playing up their Irishness on St. Patty’s Day).
But I use AA frequently when I’m talking about ethnicity. If I say collard greens and fried chicken are dishes common among black folks, I would not be wrong. But it would be more precise to say these things belong to African Americans. The descendants of American slaves belong in a different ethnic group than immigrants from Nigeria or Ghana, and to a lesser but non-trivial extent, immigrants from Jamaica or Haiti. In fact, I often won’t even call these folks "black"unless I’m being forced to describe their appearance. Whenever possible, I refer to them by their country of origin in the same way that I call white foreigners French, Dutch, or English.
Which brings me to my point: although there’s nothing inherently wrong with clinging to racial identifiers, it’s often silly and irritating to do so. Why does Jared Diamond in GGS not refer to “white” Europeans, “yellow” Asians, “brown” Indians, but he often, and in an irritating fashion, employs racial descriptors for Africans? As in “black Africans” and “white Africans” (and not in the context of colonialism, for those who haven’t read the book). The Chinese are referred to by their geography, but Bantu speakers must be referred to as “blacks”, signifying the importance of race when his whole argument is that race is not important. I wish I could say that Diamond is alone in doing this, but he’s not. Every book on African history I’ve read has this “black/white” dichotomy among Africans–as if these labels are meaningful in any way. As if Kenyan has cultural kinship with a Congalese just because their skin color happens to be close together on the color wheel. When I read these books, I can’t help but think it’s not fair how everyone can be just “man, woman, people” except if you’re an African. Then you are reduced to a color.
It’s actually more than irritating, but I’m not in the Pit so that will just have to suffice.
I think if people wish to be referred to in a certain way, then that should be reflected. However, it can go too far. My sister is mixed race black Jamaican/white English. She lives in America. She’s almost always referred to there as African American, or sometimes “African American from England”. Also, as I’ve recounted before, in the US I’ve been asked “do you have African Americans in England?”, to which I always reply “yes, if they’re on vacation.”
Priceless
So, back to my OP …
It missed my chin by two finger-widths. I always thought my Sicilian grandfather had a really African shape head.
Violent crime movies notwithstanding, the Sicily/Africa connection is generally pretty well misunderstood. The “Africans” who invaded Sicily were the remnants of the Vandals who had only come to Africa a few years earlier from Spain, to which they had originally come from the area we now know as Germany and Poland.
Prior to that, there had been some Carthaginians who had wandered over from Africa contesting Greek colonization. But the Carthaginians had originally come from Phoenicia (which is why the Romans used the word Punic to identify them) and Phoenicia (along what is now the coast of Lebannon and Israel) had actually been settled by people wandering down from the Aegean and the isles that later became Greece.
This is not to say that no person living in Sicily had ancestors whom we would tend to call black, but they are going to have been extremely rare and distant and throroughly mixed with other European types.
tomndebb, the film True Romance is definitely in large part responsible for this very common misunderstanding that, as Dennis Hopper’s character crudely puts it, “Sicilians are spawned from niggers.” It’s amazing the number of people who characterize Southern Italians as being “part black.”
Nitpick: you’re confusing the Phoenicians with the Philistines. While the latter were indeed transplaned Aegean natives - probably related to the Minoan civilization of Crete - the former were native Semitic folk who spoke a language very similar to Hebrew (consider the fact that the name “Hispania” - first settled by the Carthaginians - is suspiciously similar to the Hebrew Ee Shfania, or “Island of Rabbits”) . In fact, I suspect that at least at the beginning, the main difference between the Phoenicians and the ancient Israelites was that of religion.
This is very cool. May I say I’m jealous of the shape of your head?
If we were to get an MRI of your bones and have the DABFA’s do your race, I would expect you to come out as a Caucasoid/Negroid hybrid; which means you would have hybrid vigor (and disease resistance) to add to your envy-inspiring head shape.
But I could be wrong. I note, without getting into the argument in the posts which followed your posts, that you have been absolutely clear and accurate in characterizing your grandfather as having a “really African shape head”, which means it has that shape, and we do not know whether it is African.
A colleague I know who is Caucasoid in appearance had a family tradition of a very small percentage of American Indian. When offered a chance to participate in an experimental database of ancestry, she agreed, interested to see if they could determine her Amerind percentage. She underwent facial measurements - I do not recall all the parameters, only that they weren’t invasive. She then waited months for an answer.
Answer came at last. 98.5% Caucasoid. 1.5% African.
She was overjoyed. She couldn’t have laughed harder at her family and its traditions; and she went around to all the AA women in the office, shouting “Sistah!”, cracking up at herself, and announcing her intention to chase cute black men from now on out. (You’d have to know her.)
I wrote a story once placed thirty or forty years ahead in which everybody in the dating game knew their percentages of the three great races (much as everyone in the dating game in America knows their astrological sign, or in Japan knows their blood type), and the absolute ideal, very rarely achieved, was to be a “tri-brid”, one third of each. I still remember the face of my hero. God, he was handsome.
I’m rambling. A grateful Thank You to Aunt Beast for the compliments, with a snort for the wrong end to analyze. Maybe you, also, have that 1.5%, and can thank it for the size of your butt.
Well, I am certainly willing to admit that my (now long lost) text book confused them. I see that the current speculated origin of the Phoenicians is considered either “unknown” or “Persian Gulf.” I had a college text that claimed they were an earlier invasion of from the same area from which the Philistines eventually arrived.
I will avoid that error in the future.
(Of course, that still prevents them from being “African” in origin other than in the way that all humans are African in origin.)
Me too and hijack, both of which are rude: I want to add a heartfelt “Me too.” Part of the problem, which I think (without cite to found my opinion) is due to an unconscious or national racism, is the “marked/unmarked” problem. I think I am remembering the wrong word for this turn of mind - please correct me. The idea is that certain characteristics of people or jobs or whatever are “unmarked”, so that they can be assumed by a reader, and you only specify if they’re different, “marked”.
When I was growing up, “unmarked” for a doctor (or lawyer or judge or pilot) was male. If you read, “The doctor entered the room, bearing the bad news,” you knew he was a male doctor. To make the reader think of a female doctor, you had to mark the person: “A lady doctor entered the room, bearing the bad news.”
Also, when I was reading sci fi growing up (I am remembering Heinlein), if a narrator began a story with “I”, he was male until you were told otherwise. As a result, all the “I” characters in my first stories were male. Because I had absorbed it from the fiction. I was always sensitive to social cues, and this cue outweighed my personal experience of being female. I still feel more comfortable in many ways when my protagonist is male.
Now in America (and in Jared Diamond, and in many other offenders) “white” is unmarked, whereas any other race is marked. “A man came into the room” is understood as a white man until the person is marked: “An Asian man came into the room.” To steal a byline, “That’s racist!”
I wonder how hard this is on actors who happen to have a marked “race” (social construct) when the part is unmarked. “You can’t play the pharmacist, you’re Asian.” Or, “You can play Prospero, but we’ll work with the fact that you’re black to create an avant-garde nuance, blah blah blah.” I will bet it is responsible for more losses for actors than gains.
It is a wonderfully weird feeling to write a story under the supposition that there is no unmarked race, and that you will have to specify when characters are white. I challenge my own unconsciously inculcated racist social assumptions by specifying, “A white pharmacist came up to the counter.” The degree of discomfort I feel when I write something like that makes me aware of social cues I have absorbed without being aware I absorbed them.
Cite from that impeachable source, the USA Today in my hotel room this morning: A third of the nation’s 296.4 million people are considered minorities." A third! One hundred million of us! “Hispanics are the largest minority group at 42.7 million.” I think I have read that about 13% of America is “black” (social construct black, that is). That would be about 40,000,000 people.
“Doctor” is now almost unmarked as to gender in America. I can only dream of the day when “race” is unmarked too, and you don’t have to specify the race of the pharmacist who came up to the counter for the reader to see any race and either gender.
I dream on, pessimistic but hopeful.
How much weight is something like that given? It seems like the pencil would come closer to the chin on, Oprah, for example than it would on Michael Imperioli (Christopher on the Sopranos) or Michael Richards (Kramer on Seinfeld). Are there other things with the skull that could point you towards their correct dominant race?
Oh, sorry for hijacking What the … !!!. I’ll make my own thread.