Some blacks insist: 'I'm not African-American'
The labels used to describe Americans of African descent mark the
the movement of a people from the slave house to the White House.
Today, many are resisting this progression by holding on to a name
from the past: "black."
This Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2012 photo shows Gibre George, who
started a Facebook page called 'Don't Call Me African-American,"
in Hollywood, Fla. The labels used to describe Americans of Afri-
can descent mark the movement of a people from the slave
house to the White House. Today, many are resisting this pro-
gression by holding on to a name from the past: "black." The
debate has waxed and waned since "African-American" went
mainstream, and gained new significance after the son of a
black Kenyan and a white American moved into the White
House. President Barack Obama's identity has been contested
from all sides, renewing questions that have followed millions of
darker Americans: What are you? Where are you from? And how
do you fit into this country?
By JESSE WASHINGTON, AP National Writer
Saturday, February 4, 2012
For this group — some descended from U.S. slaves, some immigrants with a
separate history — "African-American" is not the sign of progress hailed when
the term was popularized in the late 1980s. Instead, it's a misleading
connection to a distant culture.
The debate has waxed and waned since African-American went mainstream,
and gained new significance after the son of a black Kenyan and a white
American moved into the White House. President Barack Obama's identity
has been contested from all sides, renewing questions that have followed
millions of darker Americans:
What are you?
Where are you from?
And how do you fit into this country?
Where are you from?
And how do you fit into this country?
"I prefer to be called black," said Shawn Smith, an accountant from
Houston. "How I really feel is, I'm American."
"I don't like African-American. It denotes something else to me than who I
am," said Smith, whose parents are from Mississippi and North Carolina. "I
can't recall any of them telling me anything about Africa. They told me a
whole lot about where they grew up in Macomb County and Shelby, N.C."
Gibre George
Gibre George, an entrepreneur from Miami, started a Facebook page called
"Don't Call Me African-American" on a whim. It now has about 300 "likes."
"We respect our African heritage, but that term is not really us," George
said. "We're several generations down the line. If anyone were to ship us
back to Africa, we'd be like fish out of water."
"It just doesn't sit well with a younger generation of black people," continued
George, who is 38. "Africa was a long time ago. Are we always going to be
tethered to Africa? Spiritually I'm American. When the war starts, I'm fighting
for America."
"Don't Call Me African-American" on a whim. It now has about 300 "likes."
"We respect our African heritage, but that term is not really us," George
said. "We're several generations down the line. If anyone were to ship us
back to Africa, we'd be like fish out of water."
"It just doesn't sit well with a younger generation of black people," continued
George, who is 38. "Africa was a long time ago. Are we always going to be
tethered to Africa? Spiritually I'm American. When the war starts, I'm fighting
for America."
Joan Morgan
Joan Morgan, a writer born in Jamaica who moved to New York City as a girl,
remembers the first time she publicly corrected someone about the term: at
a book signing, when she was introduced as African-American and her family
members in the front rows were appalled and hurt.
"That act of calling me African-American completely erased their history and
the sacrifice and contributions it took to make me an author," said Morgan, a
longtime U.S. citizen who calls herself Black-Caribbean American. (Some insist
Black should be capitalized.)
She said people struggle with the fact that black people have multiple
ethnicities because it challenges America's original black-white classifications.
In her view, forcing everyone into a name meant for descendants of American
slaves distorts the nature of the contributions of immigrants like her black
countrymen Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay.
Morgan acknowledges that her homeland of Jamaica is populated by the
descendants of African slaves. "But I am not African, and Africans are not
African-American," she said.
remembers the first time she publicly corrected someone about the term: at
a book signing, when she was introduced as African-American and her family
members in the front rows were appalled and hurt.
"That act of calling me African-American completely erased their history and
the sacrifice and contributions it took to make me an author," said Morgan, a
longtime U.S. citizen who calls herself Black-Caribbean American. (Some insist
Black should be capitalized.)
She said people struggle with the fact that black people have multiple
ethnicities because it challenges America's original black-white classifications.
In her view, forcing everyone into a name meant for descendants of American
slaves distorts the nature of the contributions of immigrants like her black
countrymen Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay.
Morgan acknowledges that her homeland of Jamaica is populated by the
descendants of African slaves. "But I am not African, and Africans are not
African-American," she said.
In Latin, a forerunner of the English language, the color black is "niger." In
1619, the first African captives in America were described as "negars," which
became the epithet still used by some today.
The Spanish word "negro" means black. That was the label applied by white
Americans for centuries.
The word black also was given many pejorative connotations — a black mood,
a blackened reputation, a black heart. "Colored" seemed better, until the civil
rights movement insisted on Negro, with a capital N.
Then, in the 1960s, "black" came back — as an expression of pride, a strategy
to defy oppression. [The author omitted it but I have to give credit right here
to the incomparable "JB" - <SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">James Brown</span> who, perhaps more than any other
person, made the term "Black" not only acceptable but 'respectable' through
phrase: <SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">'Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud,"</span> mo fo. QueEx]
"Every time black had been mentioned since slavery, it was bad," says Mary
Frances Berry, a University of Pennsylvania history professor and former chair
of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Reclaiming the word "was a grass-roots
move, and it was oppositional. It was like, `In your face.'"
Afro-American was briefly in vogue in the 1970s, and lingers today in the names
of some newspapers and university departments. But it was soon overshadowed
by African-American, which first sprouted among the black intelligentsia.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson is widely credited with taking African-American
mainstream in 1988, before his second presidential run.
Berry remembers being at a 1988 gathering of civil rights groups organized by
Jackson in Chicago when Ramona Edelin, then president of the National Urban
Coalition, urged those assembled to declare that black people should be called
African-American.
Edelin says today that there was no intent to exclude people born in other
countries, or to eliminate the use of black: "It was an attempt to start a
cultural offensive, because we were clearly at that time always on the
defensive."
"We said, this is kind of a compromise term," she continued. "There are those
among us who don't want to be referred to as African. And there also those
among us who don't want to be referred to as American. This was a way of
bridging divisions among us or in our ideologies so we can move forward as a
group."
Jackson, who at the time may have been the most-quoted black man in
America, followed through with the plan.
"Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some
historical, cultural base," Jackson told reporters at the time. "African-Americans
have hit that level of cultural maturity."
The effect was immediate. "Back in those days we didn't talk about things going
viral, but that's what you would say today. It was quite remarkable," said the
columnist Clarence Page, then a reporter. "It was kind of like when Black Power
first came in the `60s, there was all kinds of buzz among black folks and white
folks about whether or not I like this."
Page liked it — he still uses it interchangeably with black — and sees an
advantage to changing names.
"If we couldn't control anything else, at least we could control what people
call us," Page said. "That's the most fundamental right any human being has,
over what other people call you. (African-American) had a lot of psychic
value from that point of view."
It also has historical value, said Irv Randolph, managing editor of the Philadelphia
Tribune, a black newspaper that uses both terms: "It's a historical fact that we
are people of African descent."
"African-American embraces where we came from and where we are now," he
said. "We are Americans, no doubt about that. But to deny where we came
from doesn't make any sense to me."
Jackson agrees about such denial. "It shows a willful ignorance of our roots,
our heritage and our lineage," he said Tuesday. "A fruit without a root is dying."
He observed that the history of how captives were brought here from Africa is
unchangeable, and that Senegal is almost as close to New York as Los Angeles.
"If a chicken is born in the oven," Jackson said, "that doesn't make it a biscuit."
Today, 24 years after Jackson popularized African-American, it's unclear what
term is preferred by the community. A series of Gallup polls from 1991 to 2007
showed no strong consensus for either black or African-American. In a January
2011 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 42 percent of respondents said they
preferred black, 35 percent said African-American, 13 percent said it doesn't
make any difference, and 7 percent chose "some other term."
Meanwhile, a record number of black people in America — almost 1 in 10 —
were born abroad, according to census figures.
Tomi Obaro is one of them. Her Nigerian-born parents brought her to America
from England as a girl, and she became a citizen last year. Although she is
literally African-American, the University of Chicago senior says
the label implies she is descended from slaves. It also feels vague and liberal to
her.
"It just sort of screams this political correctness," Obaro said. She and her black
friends rarely use it to refer to themselves, only when they're speaking
in "proper company."
"Or it's a word that people who aren't black use to describe black people,"
she said.
Or it's a political tool. In a Senate race against Obama in 2004, Alan Keyes
implied that Obama could not claim to share Keyes'"African-American heritage"
because Keyes' ancestors were slaves. During the Democratic presidential
primary, some Hillary Clinton supporters made the same charge.
Last year, Herman Cain, then a Republican presidential candidate, sought to
contrast his roots in the Jim Crow south with Obama's history, and he shunned
the label African-American in favor of "American black conservative." Rush
Limbaugh mocked Obama as a "halfrican-American."
Then there are some white Americans who were born in Africa.
Paulo Seriodo is a U.S. citizen born in Mozambique to parents from Portugal. In
2009 he filed a lawsuit against his medical school, which he said suspended him
after a dispute with black classmates over whether Seriodo could call himself
African-American.
"It doesn't matter if I'm from Africa, and they are not!" Seriodo wrote at the
time. "They are not allowing me to be African-American!"
And so the saga of names continues.
"I think it's still evolving," said Edelin, the activist who helped popularize African-
American. "I'm content, for now, with African and American."
"But," she added, "that's not to say that it won't change again."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/02/04/national/a101235S38.DTL&ao=2
Online:
Jesse Washington covers race and ethnicity for The Associated Press. He is reachable at www.twitter.com/jessewashington or jwashington(at)ap.org.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/artic...04/national/a101235S38.DTL&ao=2#ixzz1lWfOD3TG
Joan Morgan: http://bit.ly/AsiuNw
"Don't Call me African-American" Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dont-call-me-African-American/205170023553
I do, but often I will say, American, of African descent.
