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Are you "African American" or "Black?"

What color are you?

  • I'm black.

    Votes: 6 6.1%

  • I'm African American.

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • I'm a person of color and you're being too sensitive.

    Votes: 3 3.0%

  • I'm an insensitive cracker.

    Votes: 55 55.6%

  • Persian chicks are the hawtness.

    Votes: 35 35.4%
  • Total voters
    99
It's odd but in the convoluted nomenclature of American racial categorization, Obama isn't African American since his ancestors weren't brought here on slave ships. In Obama's case his father probably flew here from Kenya in a Pan Am or TWA 707 (while making drunken passes at the stewardesses).
 
Hooli said:
I'm also part Cherokee so don't go talking shit about Native Americans either. :laughing
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Cool... my ancestry (besides African) is also Native: Choctaw and Lenni-Lenape. My uncle is active in the tribe. I always thought it was cool that Lenni-Lenape in English means "true people".
 
vato_loco said:
It's odd but in the convoluted nomenclature of American racial categorization, Obama isn't African American since his ancestors weren't brought here on slave ships. In Obama's case his father probably flew here from Kenya in a Pan Am or TWA 707 (while making drunken passes at the stewardesses).
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And to me, that's backwards. Way more recent. Blacks have been on the continent since the 16th century, and Anglo-American colonies since the 17th. Yes, the slave trade was intense during latter 18th and early 19th, but when you consider that one of the first soldiers in the Rev. War was a free black (Taliaferro), and that blacks were among the dockworkers participating in Boston disobedience in the 1770s (according to John Adams), it makes them hard to separate into a category other than American, imo.

What I didn't remind all in earlier post was that the coining of the term is dated to the post-60s identity politics movement when "ethnic pride" was all the rage. It was also a sort of over-correction to the n-word because really, that is just a vulgarism of Spanish word for black.. Because those terms were used so vehemently by the anti-Civil Rights racists (and broadcast on television and radio, I'll never forget one of those a-holes saying "nigra" over and over again), people sought a different term to distance themselves from the obnoxious ones. But pragmatic people, including people I know of various hues, just thought that, ultimately, black was good enough and neither pretentious nor of an immigrant implication.

As some people say, it's about the process of asserting self-identity. It's just that like many intellectual ideas of the 60s, that term is not really what common people are comfortable with. Scholars use it, people in the education field use it, demographic bean counters use it, but it's just an awkward usage and raises the objections pointed out above.
A similar thing has happened with Native Americans, Indians, First People, Indigenous Americans what-have-you. Discomfort and confusion about labels, imposed from within and without. I work with a few California tribal musicians and dancers in historical presentations, and they usually just say Indian. They only say "Native American" or "indigenous" stuff to the white intellectuals. Cracks me up. And it's a similar point: why should they have a hyphenated name before American when they are the first Americans?

At least people are trying to be considerate....

PS to Nahullo: So very many names of "tribes" translate to their own word for people across the continent (like our Pomo up north, and Pom, further North). I think they were either laughing or confused when the colonists kept asking what they called themselves. People, or course!
 
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vato_loco said:
It's odd but in the convoluted nomenclature of American racial categorization, Obama isn't African American since his ancestors weren't brought here on slave ships. In Obama's case his father probably flew here from Kenya in a Pan Am or TWA 707 (while making drunken passes at the stewardesses).
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Let me see if I have this right... You are saying that the only way a person could be African American is if their forefathers were slaves?:wtf

I hate to break it to you,but slavery has nothing to do with the term African American just as Nazis have nothing to do with the term German American.

The fuck are they teaching in schools? Or was I just hooked by a troll :dunno
 
lefty said:
I have always been against describing myself as African American. I am an American who is Black. I've never been to Africa.

It's sorta like when someone calls me "Sir", I say; "Thank You, but my name is Ed".
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Holy $hit.
Lefty is Mr. Ed...:twofinger
 
Valgar said:
Why is it that everyone is some percentage of native american?

Fuck, I'm Irish, Scottish, and Bohemian (Yes, Bohemia motherfuckers, not some beatnik fuck).

I'm a triple stingy drunk that gets into fights.
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'cause my mom's side of the family were dropped off in Georgia to work (heh, convicts :laughing ) and ended up meeting some nice Cherokee's when they escaped to east Tennessee :x
 
And you deciding it's ok to use an outdated term for another race is somehow different than white people in this thread deciding what term is ok for blacks.

Read down further in your own link. You don't want people going back to the term that was used for blacks when it was ok for native women to be called squaw.
 
Blankpage said:
And you deciding it's ok to use an outdated term for another race is somehow different than white people in this thread deciding what term is ok for blacks.

Read down further in your own link. You don't want people going back to the term that was used for blacks when it was ok for native women to be called squaw.
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Cracker ass honkie strikes back with affirmative action.
 
Bay Arean said:
... PS to Nahullo: So very many names of "tribes" translate to their own word for people across the continent (like our Pomo up north, and Pom, further North). I think they were either laughing or confused when the colonists kept asking what they called themselves. People, or course!
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You are spot on and I did not expect anyone to catch that... Quite a few indigenous cultures refer to themselves as "the people” - Lenape translates just that way.
 
Yeh, I guess it's the both imperial and later nation state identity on the part of the colonists. They came as foreign nationals and expected the same self-ids cuz that's where they were in their history. Instead, it was the oft-played out scenario of the well-equipped and armed invader asking foolish questions in the eyes of the locals....

And look, here we are, years later struggling to figure out what to call ourselves!
 
Nahullo said:
Let me see if I have this right... You are saying that the only way a person could be African American is if their forefathers were slaves?:wtf
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In 2008 many African Americans didn't think that Obama was "black" enough, for obvious reasons. There's a big difference between black Americans who share many things in common, i.e., descendants of slaves, a granddaddy from the Mississippi Delta, etc., and a political upstart born in Hawaii to a white mother from Kansas and a Kenyan father.

Nonetheless, Obama checked himself off as African American in the 2010 Census, so the issue is settled. People have the right to assert their own identity.
 
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