RE The term African American

[Recursion]

73. Jesse Jackson urged people to use it in 1988 instead of "black"

just as "black" had replaced "negro" and "negro" had replaced "colored".

It was controversial at the time IIRC (I was 12) but seems to have stuck, though it creates some odd issues. A friend of mine in high school was born in Egypt and she wanted to join the African American Student Union but couldn't, despite being the only kid in the high school actually from Africa. (And, to round that out, I find her attempt "interesting" whereas I would find a white Nigerian or Afrikaner's attempt to do that "outrageous trolling".)

This gets to sticking point #1: "black" as a concept is really an artifact of American politics; people in Europe may be Kenyan or Somali but there's not "black" in the sense that there is in the US. (Was St. Augustine "black"? He was African, probably Berber or Tuareg, his skin may have been black or brown but we don't really know because for all of Rome's unspeakable cruelty and discrimination and slavery that just never seems to have been a question that interested them very much.)

An unspoken and controversial caveat is that "African American" for some people really just means descendants of sub-Saharan African slaves (except when it doesn't... like everything on race in the US it gets complicated).

My small town in Mississippi had an all-white private school and an integrated public school. But when the college had a visiting professor from Kenya, his son went to the all-white private school and nobody really thought much about that because while he clearly wasn't "white" he also clearly wasn't "black" in the school's mindset (and obviously "black" wasn't the word people used or thought). They also went to a "white" church.

Anyways, a good run-down of the history of the phrase is here:

http://www.aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/african-american-term-brief-history

In the 20th century, many black Americans shifted from colored to Negro to black and, most recently, to African-American, sometimes within one generation. "I've had to check several different boxes in my lifetime," said Donna Brazile, former Democratic campaign manager in the 2000 presidential race. "In my birth certificate I'm identified as a Negro. Then I was black. Now I readily check African-American. I have a group of friends and we call ourselves the colored girls sometimes, to remind ourselves that we aren’t too far from that, either." The term African-American has crept steadily into the nation's vocabulary since 1988, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson held a news conference to urge Americans to use it to refer to blacks. "It puts us in our proper historical context," Jackson said then, adding in a recent interview that he still favored the term. "Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base. African-Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity."

Polls show the number of blacks using the term has steadily increased. In a survey that year conducted by ABC and The Washington Post, 66 percent said they preferred the term black, 22 preferred African-American, 10 percent liked both terms and 2 percent had no opinion. In 2000, the Census Bureau for the first time allowed respondents to check a box that carried the heading African-American next to the term black. In 2003, a poll by the same news organizations found that 48 percent of blacks preferred the term African-American, 35 percent favored black and 17 percent liked both terms. The term has become such a fixture in the political dictionary that many white politicians, including President Bush and Senator John Kerry, his Democratic rival in 2004, favored it in their political speeches. Yet Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who is white, has referred to herself on occasion as an African-American. She was born to Portuguese parents in Mozambique.

Many whites use the term for all blacks. But among blacks there is much less agreement, particularly in places like Maryland where Africans, Haitians and Dominicans mingle in the town's coffee shops, nightclubs and beauty salons, or in neighboring Washington, where the City Council voted this year to include the Ethiopian language Amharic as an official language to accommodate the growing Ethiopian community. Even adherents of African-American acknowledge that shifting demographics have made the term's meaning more unclear. "It's a comfortable term for me personally and for people like me who are of African descent and have been in this nation for a long time," said Michael Lomax, the president of the United Negro College Fund, which raises money for 38 historically black colleges. "But it gets more confusing when you recognize that this nation is full of all kinds of people of African descent." "It's a much richer and more complex variety than when we started asserting that we were African-American," said Lomax, who argues that recent black immigrants from the Caribbean and elsewhere should feel free to use the term.

Foreign-born blacks are also divided. Angelique Shofar, the Liberian-born host of a weekly radio program in Washington called "Africa Meets Africa," prefers to call herself an African, even though she has lived in the United States for 28 of her 39 years. Phillip J. Brutus, the first Haitian-born state legislator in Florida, favors the term black because it includes foreign-born immigrants and black Americans. Brutus lives in Miami, where more than a third of the blacks are foreign born. "African-American has become the politically correct term to use, but I still say black," Brutus said. "I say I'm black and American. That's what's most accurate. I think, by and large, black is more encompassing."

Side note: there are neighborhoods in DC where all the signs are in English, Spanish, and Amharic. It's pretty cool.