My daughter asked me if Senator Obama was African American and I said yes, but that he was unusual in that his father was actually born in Africa, rather than just being of African descent.
Then started thinking–how unusual is it really? What is the breakdown of AA’s who are descendants of slaves versus voluntary immigrants?
I don’t know the answer directly but a significant number of people are going to be descendants of both which complicates the question. One non-slave, immigrant ancestor from 100 years ago may have hundreds or more descendants by now but that same population may also have many more slave ancestors. Further complicating matters, many white people also have black ancestry and those aren’t accounted for in this question. It comes down to a matter of personal and societal identity.
From a recent 1999 census, only 13 % of people identifying themselves as black in the US were first or second generation immigrants.
http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/02/2007020103n.htm
The vast majority of the rest are I guess probably descended from slaves
Is Obama a second generation immigrant? His mother’s family had been American for generations, right?
Geneology is confusing.
Some of those 13% will be from the Caribbean, and also descended from slaves brought over by British (French, etc.) colonists.
Also, as a technical nitpick, there were plenty of slaves in the Roman empire and in various countries of Europe, not to mention serfs and other unfree-but-not-technically-slaves. I’d wager that most or all humans can count at least one slave among their ancestors. Needless to say, I’m not trying to say that medieval European slavery was the same as the institution of slavery in the American South, just that “slaves” is a pretty broad category.
If the OP is interested in North America in general, I’d like to point out that in Canada the figures are very different:
According to Wikipedia:
Black Canadians: 662,000 (2.2% of Canadian population)
Nearly 40% of Black Canadians have Jamaican heritage.
An additional 32% have heritage elsewhere in the Caribbean or Bermuda.
Since this has nothing to do with the OP’s question, I think this is more of a non sequiter than a nitpick.
Since slavery existed in the Caribbean, would a Caribbean immigrant could as being descended from slaves? And immigrants from Latin America might be descended from slaves in their original countries. Or is it only those descended from people enslaved inside the US before 1865?
The OP said “descendants of slaves.” I was trying to qualify “slave,” since the word doesn’t automatically have anything to do with Africans or African-Americans. For example, Obama’s great-great-great grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, was born in Ireland. Slavery was a widespread institution in medieval Ireland, to the point of being a unit of currency [Irish: cumal] and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a slave among his Irish ancestors. Yet Obama is obviously (and self-identified) African-American, not (to my knowledge) descended from U.S. slaves. (Genealogy from here)
Obviously, European slavery (a) undocumented at the individual level and (b) insignificant compared to the enslavement of Africans, thus my characterization “nitpick,” but I don’t see that it’s entirely unrelated to the OP as written.
Cite? Remember that under the feudal system, in Britain at least, very many people were effectively slaves. Or you could go back to Roman times - plenty of slavery there.
Would you accept a clarification? I meant “insignificant insofar as the modern USA is concerned.”
I can quote from a source on medieval Irish slavery: "At the bottom of society are the slaves (mug ‘male slave’, cumal ‘female slave’). … In early Irish law the slave is subject to all the restrictions of other báeth-persons [*báeth * is ‘legally incompetent’], but enjoys none of their rights. He cannot act as a witness, or make any kind of contract except under his master’s orders. He has no legal protection against ill-treatment or even death at the hands of his master. His master must pay for any crime which he commits, and is entitled to compensation for offenses committed against him. The runaway slave… cannot be given protection… (Fergus Kelly, Early Irish Law, p. 95)
It’s clear the OP was refering to American slavery.
If we want to be truly pendantic we can also say that everyone is an African descendant and therefore everyone in America is an “African-American”. But some nits really shouldn’t be picked.
you with the face: Well, okay. I’m not sure why it bothers you so. I don’t think I was disrespectful to the OP. But I don’t really want to derail the thread with a discussion about it. Please feel free to contact me off-board if you want to discuss it.
Here is a new question related to this. In school in the 60s when studying American history we were told that slaves were given surnames matching those of those keeping them in servitude (I hesitate to use the word “owners” because the concept is abominable). So if you meet a black man named Shaquille O’Neal, you could generally assume he had an ancestor kept as a slave by a someone named O’Neal.
This seems like a gross oversimplification to me. Here is my guess: many slaves who were only known by a given name picked surnames on their own when freed and had need of one. Thus “John” might become John Walker (choosing a name he liked), and his descendants would be the Walkers.
Any comments?
Mostly a supposition on my part, but I think this more often than not the case. Freed slaves likely often took common and/or famous names that they knew or names that may have offered some degree of respect or credibility. Names like Washington, Thomas, Adams, Jefferson and Jackson are incredibly common in the black community for that reason and I find the implication that they all were descended from slaves owned by former Presidents to be more than a little dubious.
Overall it’s an incredibly complex issue as it applies to the OP. Does a black man living in Chicago who immigrated from Jamaica identify himself as an African American? I think the census might treat him as such but it’s probably more accurate to call him Jamaican. Also, in the early US there were a lot of black people living here who were not slaves long before the Civil War. In the north there were almost certainly many freed slaves for generations prior to emancipation and there are probably a not insignificant number of black immigrants who never were slaves but were Americans prior to emancipation. Many of the slave traders were blacks after all. It’s safe to assume that just about every black living in the US who has been here for several generations has intermarried with former slaves regardless of what their ancestors status was.
To even begin to answer the question you really need to tighten up your definitions.
In all these discussions I tend to just shrug my shoulders and just say we’re all Americans. Some are white, some are black, some are in between and describing someone as such probably should be as specific as we need to be, and I’ve never understood why some people think black is somehow offensive. As a point of fact most “African Americans” I meet probably have just as many ancestors born here as I do, and in some cases more, and I’m probably 5th or 6th generation American. To call them “African Americans” probably in some oblique way implies they are more recently immigrated (and to some peoples sensibilities, less “American”) than I am which just isn’t the case. If you want to describe those 1st and 2nd generation immigrants as Nigerian American or Somalian American, that’s fine, but at some point shouldn’t we note that “African American” is a pretty silly concept to describe black people who simply have no association with their distant ancestors “nation” as it were?
I just can’t follow why Dr Drake is being queried. The answer seemed quite logical and not entirely separate from the original question.
Not to speak for ywtf, but it seemed to be an overly pedantic nitpick.
It’s like asking how many Americans are descended from Native Americans, and someone saying, “Of course, all of us are descended from an indigenous person from somewhere.” I agree with ywtf that it is implied in the OP that we are talking about the recent slavery that happened in the Americas (or perhaps just the US), not something that happened in distant ancient civilizations.
I didnt sense that you was particularly offended or bothered, but if a poster is going to go after such a picuayne point, they should be prepared for someone to do the same to them.
Fair enough- I have no problem with either point of view. I just ccepted that Dr Drake was trying to broaden the definition of slave rather than change the ourse of the discussion.
I retreat, chastened.
I wasn’t offended at all, but Dr. Drake’s point, while probably well-intentioned, is of the sort that tends to steer conversations about American slavery towards a tangent that is annoying in its lack of insight. Who doesn’t know that slavery has been historically a common phenomenon? Reminders about how slavery was practiced in the days of Julius Caesar are cool and all, but since the OP wasn’t implying in any way that slavery was unique to the US, you have to wonder what would be the point of bringing this up.
It would be like someone asking “What percentage of Jews are not related to a Holocaust victim”, and then seeing someone say that holocausts have been practiced since the days of Atilla. Not an offensive thing to say, but it does have a certain WTF? pointlessness to it.
Hope that makes sense.
The word “serf” is, of course, derived from the Latin servus. But chattel slavery in Europe ended when Rome & came back in fashion during the Renaissance. (Not to say that serfdom was fun!)
To continue on this thread hijack–my own Irish ancestors could have included slaves & slave-owners. And some Irish were enslaved & shipped to the West Indies in the 17th century.
Eventually, it got sorted out on racial lines. Which brings us back to the OP! (I’ve got some Nigerian co-workers. They get really embarrassed when I mention e-mails I’ve received from their countrymen, offering financial deals.)