African Americans
An African-American is an American descended, usually predominantly, from black Africans. Over the years, the term has supplanted, in succession, the equivalent terms, colored, colored people, negro, and Negro. and commonly is used interchangeably with black -- which also is used commonly to describe people with noticeable indigenous African ancestry, regardless of their geographic location.
Virtually all persons who refer to themselves as African-Americans are descendants of persons brought to the Americas as slaves or indentured servants between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
Those whose ancestors were brought as slaves to the Caribbean, or to Latin America, but have come to the United States as free people, are sometimes called African-American, but they seldom use the term self-referentially. The general rule regarding ethnic appellations in the U.S. is the more specific, the better. Just like other immigrants to the United States, these black immigrants more commonly are referred to by their nations of origin. If they are from the English- or French-speaking Caribbean, they are Jamaican-American, Haitian-American, and so forth, or, simply, Caribbean-American. The same rule applies to African immigrants, for example Kenyan-American.
The one exception to this general rule is blacks who immigrate to the U.S. from Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking nations in Central and South America. They are Hispanic, and most often refer to themselves as Latino, and, increasingly, Afro-Latino.
Because indigenous Africans are black, and only black Africans were chattel slaves in the U.S., the term African-American is not properly to used to refer to non-black Africans, such as Asiatic- or Euro-Semitic immigrants from northern Africa, or immigrants who were either themselves, or whose ancestors were, white settlers or immigrants to the African continent. Some Afro-Semitic peoples who immigrate to the U.S., however, are referred to as blacks. And, like other blacks, they sometimes are referred to as African-American.
Through the 1950s, most considered black a derogatory term, but it became popular a decade later during the Black Pride or Black Consciousness movement of the mid to late 1960s, following close on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement. It remains a common term in the United States to describe all people of indigenous African descent and is often used interchangeably with African-American. (Most of the terms discussed in this article were not considered pejorative and in their time were used both by African Americans and members of the majority.)
Origins
While the term had been used in print in some circles at least since the 1920s (and often shortened to Afro-American, the name of a famous Baltimore newspaper founded in 1892), it has become much more widely used in the United States since the 1970s and generally is considered the self-referential term of choice. As of 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau identifies 12.9% of the US population as black or African-American.
Political Overtones
It is important to note that use of this term carries important political overtones. Previous terms used to identify American blacks were conferred upon the group by whites and were included in the wording of various laws and legal decisions which became tools of white supremacy and oppression. There developed among blacks in America a growing desire for a term of their own choosing.
With the political consciousness that emerged from the political and social ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Negro fell into disfavor among many American blacks. It had taken on a moderate, accommodationist, even Uncle Tomish, connotation. The period was a time when growing numbers of blacks in the U.S., particularly black youth, celebrated their blackness and their historical and cultural ties with the African continent. They defiantly embraced black as a group identifier, a term often associated in English with things negative and undesirable -- a term they themselves had repudiated only two decades earlier -- proclaiming, "Black is beautiful."
By the 1990s, the terms Afro-American and African-American began to reemerge, this time for many as self-referential terms of choice. Just as other ethnic groups in American society historically had adopted names descriptive of their families' geographical points of origin (such as Italian-American, Irish-American, Polish-American), many blacks in America expressed a preference for a similar term. Because of the historical circumstances surrounding the capture, enslavement and systematic attempts to de-Africanize blacks in the U.S. under chattel slavery, most American blacks are unable to trace their ancestry to a specific African nation; hence, the entire continent serves as a geographic marker.
For many, African-American is more than a name expressive of cultural and historical roots. The term expresses black pride and a sense of kinship and solidarity with others of the black African diaspora -- an embracing of the notion of pan-Africanism earlier enunciated by prominent black thinkers such as Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Dubois and, later, George Padmore.
A discussion of the term African-American and related terms can be found in the journal article "The Politicization of Changing Terms of Self Reference Among American Slave Descendants" in American Speech v 66 is 2 Summer 1991 p. 133-46.
Who is African-American?
To be considered African-American in the United States of America, not even half of one's ancestry must be black. But will one quarter do, or one-eighth, or less? The nation's answer to the question "Who is black?" long has been that a black is any person with any known African black ancestry. This definition reflects the long experience with slavery and later with Jim Crow laws.
In the southern United States, it became known as the one-drop rule, meaning that a single drop of "black blood" makes a person black. Some courts have called it the traceable amount rule, and anthropologists call it the hypo-descent rule, meaning that racially mixed persons are assigned the status of the subordinate group. This definition emerged from the American South to become America's national definition, generally accepted by whites and blacks -- but for different reasons. White supremacists, whose motivation was racist, considered anyone with black ancestry tainted and subordinate, if not inherently inferior. Blacks, on the other hand, generally shared a common lot in society and, therefore, common cause -- regardless of their ethnic mixture.
The United States Supreme Court formalized the legal status of this rule in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), where the Court affirmed the legality of racial segregation and upheld the state of Louisiana's ruling that, despite being 7/8ths white, Homer Plessy's one black great-grandparent rendered him legally black and, therefore, subject to being barred from whites-only railway carriages.
In the last decade, a growing movement has developed, spearheaded mostly by white mothers of African-American children, towards the adoption and acceptance of the term bi-racial. Some bi-racial blacks also refer to themselves as mixed, when, in fact, virtually all African-Americans are mixed. In the mid 1970s, New York's New Amsterdam News reported that African-Americans with Native American ancestry numbered in the upper 80th percentile. Further, recent genetic tests on a small population of African-Americans revealed their ancestry to be, on average, approximately 19 percent white.
Additionally, throughout U.S. history, very fair persons with straight hair sometimes chose to "pass" as white to escape racism and discrimination, oftentimes completely separating themselves from contact with darker members of their family. This was a dangerous action, in light of anti-miscegenation laws, social attitudes and lynch mobs. Many lived in constant fear of producing children with telltale African features or being otherwise discovered.
Terms no longer in common use
The term Negro, which was widely used until the 1960s, today generally is considered inappropriate and derogatory. Once widely considered acceptable, it fell into disfavor for reasons already herein stated. The self-referential term of preference for Negro became black. Another objection to the term is that it too easily could be misprounced unintentionally or by design to sound like nigra a Southern euphemism for nigger, the much-detested slur.
Negroid is an anthropological term related to Negro, once in common use to describe indigenous Africans and their descendants throughout the African diaspora. As with most descriptors of race based on outmoded phenotypical standards, however, the term is often meaningless in various contexts and, though still in use, generally is considered scientifically and socially atavistic.
Other largely defunct, seldom used terms to define African-American are mulatto and colored. The term mulatto originally was used to mean the offspring of a "pure African black" and a "pure European white". The Latin root of the word is mulo, as in "mule", implying incorrectly that, like mules, which are horse-donkey hybrids, mulattoes are sterile crosses of two different species. For example, in the early twentieth century, African-American leaders such as Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass, who had slaves as mothers and white fathers, were referred to as mulattoes.
The term quadroon referred to a person who is one-fourth African in descent, perhaps someone born to a Caucasian mother and a mulatto father. Someone of one-eighth African descent was technically an octoroon, although the term was used to refer to any white person with even a hint of black ancestry.
With the end of slavery, there was no commercial incentive to classify blacks by their African-European ancestral admixture. Though mulatto and terms with the -roon suffix persisted in a social context for a number of decades, by the mid twentieth century, they no longer were in general use.
The terms colored, black and negro meant any slave or descendant of a slave, regardless of racial mixture. Eventually in the U.S, the terms mulatto, colored, negro, Negro, black, and African-American all have come to mean people with any known black African ancestry.
The descriptive term Black American has never been common in the US: Black American and white American are used only when the writer or speaker feels the need to emphasize both race and that they are speaking specifically of Americans.
Slavery and oppression
People of sub-Saharan Africa, often kidnapped and sold into slavery by Arabs and other black Africans (sometimes as a result of inter-tribal warfare), were brought to the United States involuntarily by slave traders from many European nations as well as the United States from 1619 through 1806, when the trade was declared illegal. Portugal, England, Spain, the United States and France were the primary European powers involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
In the South, during the brief period of black progress after the Civil War called Reconstruction, some strides were made toward equal rights for African-Americans. Blacks were elected to the U.S. Congress and held local public office, established schools and built towns and businesses. However, in the face of southern violence and intimidation directed at blacks as well as whites sympathetic to their cause, the U.S. government refused to step in to guarantee constitutional protections to freedmen and women. The pattern of de facto and de jure racial segregation, discrimination and oppression against blacks and a system of white power and privilege continued to pervade virtually all facets of American life. The groundbreaking gains of Reconstruction were reversed, and white mob violence against African-Americans intensified.
After its founding in 1867, the Ku Klux Klan, a clandestine organization sworn to perpetuate white supremacy through violence, intimidation and terrorism, became a power in the South and beyond, eventually establishing a northern headquarters in Greenfield, Indiana. Lynchings escalated dramatically in a period that marked the bleakest era in U.S. black-white race relations. It was reported that nearly 3,100 black men and women were lynched from 1889 to 1930, virtually all victims of white, racially motivated violence. The victims were often tortured, the men castrated and otherwise mutilated, often burned, their body parts distributed as souvenirs. Photographs of smiling, white onlookers and black bodies hanging from trees, or of heaps of charred human remains became for a time the subject of popular postcards -- until the U.S. Post Office banned them in the 1930s. Of the tens of thousands of lynchers and onlookers during this period, many photographed holding macabre trophies, it is reported that less than 50 whites were ever indicted for their crimes, and only 4 sentenced.
Other violence also marked the period, including a number of white-instigated race riots over the years. They usually began with false rumors of black men having raped white women. In the "Red Summer" of 1919, an orgy of white-on-black violence erupted in the form of race riots in 26 cities across the nation, among them Chicago, Illinois; Washington, D.C.; Charleston, South Carolina; Nashville and Knoxville, Tennessee; Omaha, Nebraska; Longview, Texas; and Elaine, Arkansas. Over 100 African-Americans were killed, and thousands wounded, their homes, churches, schools and businesses destroyed.
Many legal barriers to equality were removed as a result of the work of the Civil Rights Movement during the years between the end of World War II and the end of the 1960s (see Lyndon B. Johnson); however, de facto discrimination and segregation still persist, and racially motivated lynchings and other less violent hate crimes, though relatively isolated, still occur.
See also
- Amistad
- List of African-Americans
- List of African-American-related topics
- Black Canadian
- Middle Passage