African American

An African American is an American predominantly, orat least partially, descended from black Africans , typically called a Black American (see also below). As historically the vast majority of those in the UnitedStates of African descent were black, the term is not typically used to apply to non-black Africans, such as Arabs from northern Africa.

Most African Americans are descendants of persons brought to the Americas as slaves between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. (Those whose ancestors were brought as slaves to theCaribbean, or to Latin America, but who have come to the United States as free people, are sometimes classified asAfrican-American, but are sometimes classified as Latin-American or Caribbean-American instead. Thosewho have come from Africa in the 20th or 21st centuries are often identified by their country of origin—for example,Nigerian-American.)

While the term had been used in print in some circles at least since the 1920s (andoften shortened to Afro-American, the name of a famous Baltimore newspaper founded in 1892 ) it came to muchwider use in the United States since the 1970s as the preferred term, as requested by some black Americans themselves. As of 2000 , the U.S. Census Bureau identifies 12.9% of theUS population as Black or African-American.

To be considered Black in the United States of America not even halfof one's ancestry must be African Black. But will one fourth do, or one-eight, or less? The nation's answer to the question "Whois Black?" has long been that a Black is any person with any known African black ancestry. This definition reflects the longexperience with slavery and later with Jim Crow laws . In the south of the country it became known as the one-drop rule , meaning that a single drop of "black blood" makes a person black. Some courts have called itthe "traceable amount rule", and anthropologists call it the "hypo-descent rule", meaning that racially mixed persons areassigned the status of the subordinate group. This definition emerged from the American South to become the American'sdefinition, generally accepted by whites and blacks. Since the end of legal sanctions on African Americans, some have chosen toidentify themselves as "mixed" instead of African American. Additionally throughout US history, very pale persons sometimes choseto pass as white and joined the white community, oftentimes completelyseparating themselves from contact with darker members of their family. This at some times and places was a dangerous action, inlight of anti- miscegenation laws and lynch mobs . Recent genetic tests have found that those who classify themselves African-Americans are today onaverage 19% white.

Table of contents

1 Term criticism and alternative names

1.1 Terms no longer in common use

2 Slavery and oppression

3 See also

4 External links

Term criticism and alternative names

Early proponents of the term African American believed it increased the status of Black Americans because of itsparallels with terms for other ethnic groups, e.g. Irish American and Asian American . Critics point out that its wide spread acceptance bymany whites is due to a desire to see blacks like other ethnic groups who came to the United States by choice and ignore the implications of slavery and the middle passage .

The use of the term African American has often been criticized as political correctness . Today, using the word black is accepted by most, and some actuallyobject to African American. One objection is that it incorrectly implies that all Africans are black. A white immigrantfrom Africa (for example a South African ; prominent examples includemusician Dave Matthews and actress Charlize Theron ) would technically be an "African American," but because of the term's existing racialcontext, would find it hard to seriously use the title. In addition, even if some of one's remote ancestors descend from Africa,a dark-skinned immigrant from, for example Haiti or Cuba (or even a European nation) might prefer not to be identified as African, and some dark skinned imigrants to the United States from Africa believe the term should be reserved for them toprovide a separate identity from black Americans who are descendants from slaves.

Another criticism of the term African American has been that the term European American has not been widely used to replace the term white when referring to Caucasians , leading to inequity of terminology. In addition, AfricanAmerican assumes that the person referred to is a US citizen. Yet at any given time a substantial number of black peoplein the United States are foreigners. It is obvious that these individuals are not African Americans.

Terms no longer in common use

The term negro , which was widely used until the 1960s (even among civil rights leaders), is today often considered inappropriate and derogatory, in large part due toits similarity to the slur nigger . In previous periods, theterm negro was widely used as a shortened form of the scientific racial classification negroid , a classification that is no longer widely accepted.

Another term to define African-American is "mulatto" and colored . The term"mulatto" was originally used to mean the offspring of a "pure African black" and a "pure European white". The Latin root of theword is mulo, meaning mule, so as to infer that mulattoes are sterile (unable to have children). For example, in the earlytwentieth century African-American activists such as Booker T.Washington and Frederick Douglass , who had slaves asmothers and white fathers, were referred to as mulattoes. To whatever extent their mothers were part white, these men were morethan half white.

The term "quadroon" refers to a person who is one-fourth African in descent, perhaps someone born to a Caucasian mother and amulatto father. Someone of one-eighth African descent is an "octoroon", although the term has been used loosely to refer toanyone with a small-but-present amount of Black blood. The word "méamelouc" became the standard label for someone whose ancestrywas one-sixteenth sub-Saharan African, while a one-thirty-second mix was a "demi-méamelouc". The word "sang-melé" covered someonewho had at least one known ancestor from Africa, but was less than one-thirty-second Black. Someone who hasthree-fourths Black (the progeny of a mulatto and a pure African, ideally) was traditionally called a "griffe".

The term "colored" seemed for a time to refer only to mulattoes, especially lighter ones, but later it became a euphemism fordarker Blacks, even including unmixed Blacks. With widespread racial mixture, "Black" or "Negro" came to mean any slave ordescendant of a slave, no matter how much mixed. Eventually in the U.S, the terms mulatto, colored, Negro, black,African-American all came to mean, people with any known black African ancestry. Mulattoes are racially mixed, to whateverdegree, while the terms black, Negro, African-American and coloured include both mulattoes and unmixed blacks.

A discussion of this subject can be found in the journal article "The Politicization of Changing Terms of Self Reference AmongAmerican Slave Descendants" in American Speech v 66 is 2 Summer 1991 p. 133-46.

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 tothe 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. Afterthe abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War ,African Americans continued to be denied fully equal civil rights in manyjurisdictions. This happened both legally and through extra-legal cultural practices, including in the most extreme form lynchings and terrorism by groups such asthe Ku Klux Klan . Legal barriers to equality were removed as a result ofthe work of the civil rights movement during the yearsbetween the end of World War II and the end of the 1960s (see Lyndon Johnson ).

African Americans are seen as the most oppressed and disadvantaged racial group in North America, along with Native Americans and Hispanics .African-American males are more likely to be imprisoned or sentenced todeath than any other demographic group, especially between the ages of 20 and 39. In addition, African American public schoolstudents are most likely to be assigned to special-education classes or get suspended or expelled from school. Female African-American public school students make the lowest SAT scores of any demographic group.

External links