The labels used to describe Americans of African descent mark 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."

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?
"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."
Gibré 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."

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.

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.

"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."


Culled from Yahoo news.

My Friend Parents were born in the united States of America; They are of mixed blood- African slave--Slave master-Cherokee Indian- Their children were born in Germany, What are they?

jellyloveb:

My Friend Parents were born in the united States of America; They are of mixed blood- African slave--Slave master-Cherokee Indian- Their children were born in Germany, What are they?

I would call your friend parents an American, pure and simple,  with the heritage of North American Indian, with some black from what ever source. Still they are an American!!! and their children are Americans unless they are dual citizens.

They're americans, unless they want to claim they're german.

Well, the're right.  How can one be born in USA, parents bon in US, Grand parents born in US. and the person is mixed with 3 different races be called "African"American?  .

But hey. who cares who they want to be? Michel Jackson super bleached his skin to look white and he was accepected by whites.

Hey, they have a right to be called Blacks, if they don't have African decent in them, why call them Africans? I agree with the article,

We cant rule out the Ancestry. Wether they accept it or not the basic truth is they are Africans and then American. Every Black man in the world has roots in Africa.

Read this yesterday.


February 5, 2012

Brown U. Student Uncovers Lost Malcolm X Speech

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — The recording was forgotten, and so, too, was the odd twist of history that brought together Malcolm X and a bespectacled Ivy Leaguer fated to become one of America's top diplomats.

The audiotape of Malcolm X's 1961 address in Providence might never have surfaced at all if 22-year-old Brown University student Malcolm Burnley hadn't stumbled across a reference to it in an old student newspaper. He found the recording of the little-remembered visit gathering dust in the university archives.

"No one had listened to this in 50 years," Burnley told The Associated Press. "There aren't many recordings of him before 1962. And this is a unique speech — it's not like others he had given before."

In the May 11, 1961 speech delivered to a mostly white audience of students and some residents, Malcolm X combines blistering humor and reason to argue that blacks should not look to integrate into white society but instead must forge their own identities and culture.

At the time, Malcolm X, 35, was a loyal supporter of the black separatist movement Nation of Islam. He would be assassinated four years later after leaving the group and crafting his own more global, spiritual ideology.

The legacy of slavery and racism, he told the crowd of 800, "has made the 20 million black people in this country a dead people. Dead economically, dead mentally, dead spiritually. Dead morally and otherwise. Integration will not bring a man back from the grave."

The rediscovery of the speech could be the whole story. But Burnley found the young students in the crowd that night proved to be just as fascinating.

Malcolm X was prompted to come to Brown by an article about the growing Black Muslim movement published in the Brown Daily Herald. The article by Katharine Pierce, a young student at Pembroke College, then the women's college at Brown, was first written for a religious studies class. It caught the eye of the student paper's editor, Richard Holbrooke.

Holbrooke would become a leading American diplomat, serving as U.S. Ambassador to Germany soon after that nation's reunification, ambassador to the United Nations and President Obama's special adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan before his death in 2010 at age 69.

But in 1961 Holbrooke was 20, and eager to use the student newspaper to examine race relations — an unusual interest on an Ivy League campus with only a handful of black students.

Pierce's article ran in the newspaper's magazine and made her the first woman whose name was featured on the newspaper's masthead.

Somehow, the article made its way to Malcolm X. His staff and Holbrooke worked out details of the visit weeks in advance. Campus officials were wary: Malcolm X had been banned from the University of California-Berkeley and Queens College in New York.

Tickets — 50 cents — for the Brown speech sold quickly. About 800 people filled the venue, the 19th-century, Romanesque Sayles Hall, meant to hold about 500.

Pierce introduced Malcolm X and recalls him vividly.

"He came surrounded by a security detail," she recalls. "You got the sense — this is an important person. He was handsome, absolutely charismatic. I was just bewildered that my class paper could have led to something like this."

In his speech, Malcolm X outlined Black Muslims' beliefs and argued that black Americans cannot wait for white Americans to offer them equality.

"No, we are not anti-white," he said. "But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already,  He has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people."

Richard Nurse, one of three black students in his Brown University class in 1961, came to the speech with his mind made up against Malcolm X.

"I very strongly believed in integration," Nurse said in a telephone interview from his New Jersey home. "These were ideas I had accepted, adopted. Here I was at this Ivy League university. But he confounded me a little bit. I had never heard a black man in public speak as forcefully as Malcolm X did that night. It was cataclysmic."

Nurse, now 72 and retired from teaching at Rutgers University, said the speech didn't cause him to change his views. But he said he understood Malcolm X's message better years later when, in the U.S. Army, he was barred from all-white USO clubs and movie theaters in the South.

"Now things have changed to the point where that kind of notion (separatism) is no longer even considered," he said.

Pierce said the speech exposed her and other students in the audience to a different side of America. She gives Holbrooke credit for bringing Malcolm X to campus.

Holbrooke joined the foreign service after graduation and was posted to Vietnam in 1962. He visited Pierce in Hong Kong, where she worked as a teacher. She went on to work on international refugee projects and at Yale University and now creates computer training programs.

She said she wasn't surprised when Holbrooke became the diplomat presidents dispatched to hotspots like Bosnia and Afghanistan.

"He was a very good friend," she said of Holbrooke. "I was saddened to hear of his death, sad for myself and sad for the world."

The recording of the address is in pristine condition. Pierce obtained the tape after the event — she isn't sure who made the recording — and it sat in a box of mementos for years before she mailed it to the university archives.

Burnley has had the tape digitized and plans to air excerpts next week at an event hosted by the Rhode Island Black Heritage Association.

Lehigh University professor Saladin Ambar, who is working on a book about Malcolm X's 1964 visit to Oxford University, said any new recording of him is reason to celebrate.

"Malcolm's best speeches, they're just gone," he said. "He's not nearly as well-documented as he should be, when you consider his power as an orator."


In Nigeria, Malcolm was given the name Omowale, “the son who has come home.” This photo was taken in 1964.

Black American or African American. Same difference

Africans are black Africans and are Africans as well. Does that mean you can't call us either ir

AA shoudl stop being stupid. Black is a skin color. African denotes Ancestry tie to the African based on "recent' socially accepted heritage.

Wait 4 mzdarkin she likes 2 argue over black race,africa american and caribbean.

Wealthy white men in the U.S. have it made! They dodge being called beneficiaries of Affirmative Action although 99.9% of our presidents were white/male/wealthy. They avoid being called welfare recipients although they get bailouts and severence packages to die for. They can run for president with their ex-mistress by their side with no static while a classy wife and mother in the White House is coined an "Angry Black Woman". It must be good being white, male, and wealthy.

I wonder what the Chinese Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans etc should do ooo.

White007:

Wealthy white men in the U.S. have it made! They dodge being called beneficiaries of Affirmative Action although 99.9% of our presidents were white/male/wealthy. They avoid being called welfare recipients although they get bailouts and severence packages to die for. They can run for president with their ex-mistress by their side with no static while a classy wife and mother in the White House is coined an "Angry Black Woman". It must be good being white, male, and wealthy.

Get over yourself. Grow a pair and make your own path.

^^^
I bet you are not even one of the people I'm talking about. That's another reason why it must be great being wealthy white men, they get the po' ones like you to stand up for them even though you have more in common with po' black ones. LOL!

White007:

Wealthy white men in the U.S. have it made! They dodge being called beneficiaries of Affirmative Action although 99.9% of our presidents were white/male/wealthy. They avoid being called welfare recipients although they get bailouts and severence packages to die for. They can run for president with their ex-mistress by their side with no static while a classy wife and mother in the White House is coined an "Angry Black Woman". It must be good being white, male, and wealthy.

It's great! Of course, it did not happen by accident. Lots of hard work involved. . . .

Afro_Blue:

Read this yesterday.


February 5, 2012

Brown U. Student Uncovers Lost Malcolm X Speech

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — The recording was forgotten, and so, too, was the odd twist of history that brought together Malcolm X and a bespectacled Ivy Leaguer fated to become one of America's top diplomats.

The audiotape of Malcolm X's 1961 address in Providence might never have surfaced at all if 22-year-old Brown University student Malcolm Burnley hadn't stumbled across a reference to it in an old student newspaper. He found the recording of the little-remembered visit gathering dust in the university archives.

"No one had listened to this in 50 years," Burnley told The Associated Press. "There aren't many recordings of him before 1962. And this is a unique speech — it's not like others he had given before."

In the May 11, 1961 speech delivered to a mostly white audience of students and some residents, Malcolm X combines blistering humor and reason to argue that blacks should not look to integrate into white society but instead must forge their own identities and culture.

At the time, Malcolm X, 35, was a loyal supporter of the black separatist movement Nation of Islam. He would be assassinated four years later after leaving the group and crafting his own more global, spiritual ideology.

The legacy of slavery and racism, he told the crowd of 800, "has made the 20 million black people in this country a dead people. Dead economically, dead mentally, dead spiritually. Dead morally and otherwise. Integration will not bring a man back from the grave."

The rediscovery of the speech could be the whole story. But Burnley found the young students in the crowd that night proved to be just as fascinating.

Malcolm X was prompted to come to Brown by an article about the growing Black Muslim movement published in the Brown Daily Herald. The article by Katharine Pierce, a young student at Pembroke College, then the women's college at Brown, was first written for a religious studies class. It caught the eye of the student paper's editor, Richard Holbrooke.

Holbrooke would become a leading American diplomat, serving as U.S. Ambassador to Germany soon after that nation's reunification, ambassador to the United Nations and President Obama's special adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan before his death in 2010 at age 69.

But in 1961 Holbrooke was 20, and eager to use the student newspaper to examine race relations — an unusual interest on an Ivy League campus with only a handful of black students.

Pierce's article ran in the newspaper's magazine and made her the first woman whose name was featured on the newspaper's masthead.

Somehow, the article made its way to Malcolm X. His staff and Holbrooke worked out details of the visit weeks in advance. Campus officials were wary: Malcolm X had been banned from the University of California-Berkeley and Queens College in New York.

Tickets — 50 cents — for the Brown speech sold quickly. About 800 people filled the venue, the 19th-century, Romanesque Sayles Hall, meant to hold about 500.

Pierce introduced Malcolm X and recalls him vividly.

"He came surrounded by a security detail," she recalls. "You got the sense — this is an important person. He was handsome, absolutely charismatic. I was just bewildered that my class paper could have led to something like this."

In his speech, Malcolm X outlined Black Muslims' beliefs and argued that black Americans cannot wait for white Americans to offer them equality.

"No, we are not anti-white," he said. "But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already,  He has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people."

Richard Nurse, one of three black students in his Brown University class in 1961, came to the speech with his mind made up against Malcolm X.

"I very strongly believed in integration," Nurse said in a telephone interview from his New Jersey home. "These were ideas I had accepted, adopted. Here I was at this Ivy League university. But he confounded me a little bit. I had never heard a black man in public speak as forcefully as Malcolm X did that night. It was cataclysmic."

Nurse, now 72 and retired from teaching at Rutgers University, said the speech didn't cause him to change his views. But he said he understood Malcolm X's message better years later when, in the U.S. Army, he was barred from all-white USO clubs and movie theaters in the South.

"Now things have changed to the point where that kind of notion (separatism) is no longer even considered," he said.

Pierce said the speech exposed her and other students in the audience to a different side of America. She gives Holbrooke credit for bringing Malcolm X to campus.

Holbrooke joined the foreign service after graduation and was posted to Vietnam in 1962. He visited Pierce in Hong Kong, where she worked as a teacher. She went on to work on international refugee projects and at Yale University and now creates computer training programs.

She said she wasn't surprised when Holbrooke became the diplomat presidents dispatched to hotspots like Bosnia and Afghanistan.

"He was a very good friend," she said of Holbrooke. "I was saddened to hear of his death, sad for myself and sad for the world."

The recording of the address is in pristine condition. Pierce obtained the tape after the event — she isn't sure who made the recording — and it sat in a box of mementos for years before she mailed it to the university archives.

Burnley has had the tape digitized and plans to air excerpts next week at an event hosted by the Rhode Island Black Heritage Association.

Lehigh University professor Saladin Ambar, who is working on a book about Malcolm X's 1964 visit to Oxford University, said any new recording of him is reason to celebrate.

"Malcolm's best speeches, they're just gone," he said. "He's not nearly as well-documented as he should be, when you consider his power as an orator."


In Nigeria, Malcolm was given the name Omowale, “the son who has come home.” This photo was taken in 1964.

Malcolm X: I have read his Autobiography by Alex Haley. The only black man that ever told the black man the BITTER truth.

Martin Luther King: More of a diplomat and a clergyman. Fought for equal opportunity but didn't tell the black man the bitter truth about himself.

Decades later, America is still fundamentally flawed and the Black man comes last in every aspects of life in the American society even after the civil rights movement. Oh, some say they have come a long way; but lets not forget that the world in it sense has become more modernized. It was only a natural progression in my view.

After Obama was elected President, a white American asked me how i felt about it(after the barrage of attacks against his ORIGIN, Cmon)? I said, buddy, "This is how it was supposed to be from the onset of America".  How did he expect me to react?  Jump up like an excited monkey with a banana? Cmon, he was flabbergasted by my response .

Malcolm thought me one or two things about life and to know my true self as a Black man.

Aringarosa:

The labels used to describe Americans of African descent mark 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."

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?
"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."
Gibré 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."

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.

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.

"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."


Culled from Yahoo news.

The Black man is always trying to run away from himself, but he simply CANNOT.  I think it was Peter Tosh who said, "No matter where you come from, as far as you are a black man, you are an African!". The world sees us through that prism and until we accept Reality and embrace each other in Unity. We will continue to go blind and treated like chumps without coherent VISION.

Bob Marley summarized it;

[b]
Ya running and ya running
And ya running away.
Ya running and ya running
And ya running away.
Ya running and ya running
And ya running away.
Ya running and ya running,
But ya can't run away from yourself
Can't run away from yourself -
Can't run away from yourself -
Can't run away from yourself -
Can't run away from yourself -
Can't run away from yourself.

Ya must have done (must have done),
Somet'in' wrong (something wrong).
Said: ya must have done (must have done),
Wo! Somet'in' wrong (something wrong).
Why you can't find the
Place where you belong?
Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do (running away);
Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do (running away);
Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do (running away);
Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do (running away);
Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do (running away).

Every man thinketh his
Burden is the heaviest (heaviest).
Every man thinketh his
Burden is the heaviest (heaviest).
Ya still mean it: Who feels it knows it, Lord;
Who feels it knows it, Lord;
Who feels it knows it, Lord;
Who feels it knows it, Lord.

Ya running and ya running
And ya running away.
Ya running and ya running
And ya running away.
Ya running and ya running
And ya running away.
Ya running and ya running
But ya can't run away from yourself.
Could ya run away from yourself?
Can you run away from yourself?
Can't run away from yourself!
Can't run away from yourself!
Yeah-eah-eah-eah - from yourself.

Brr - you must have done somet'in' -
Somet'in' - somet'in' - somet'in' -
Somet'in' ya don't want nobody to know about:
Ya must have, Lord - somet'in' wrong,
What ya must have done - ya must have done somet'in' wrong.
Why you can't find where you belong?

Well, well, well, well, ya running away, heh, no -
Ya running away, ooh, no, no, no,
I'm not (running away), no, don't say that - don't say that,
'Cause (running away) I'm not running away, ooh! (running away)
I've got to protect my life, (running away)
And I don't want to live with no strife. (running away)
It is better to live on the housetop (running away)
Than to live in a house full of confusion. (running away)
So, I made my decision and I left ya; (running away)
Now you comin' to tell me (running away)
That I'm runnin' away. (running away)
But it's not true, (running away)
I am not runnin' away. (running away) [fadeout][/b]

As long as your ancestors are from Africa. . . white or black. . . and you live in the USA. . . YOU ARE AFRICAN AMERICAN. No exceptions.

Aringarosa:

It's great! Of course, it did not happen by accident. Lots of hard work involved. . . .

Yeh, lots of hard work was involved. Ask the black slaves who worked the cotton fields for free for over 250 years. They'll tell ya.

^^^
you know. . . . atleast the slave worked for their room and board back then. . . . now the black just want room and board for no work. . . .

Aringarosa:

^^^
you know. . . . atleast the slave worked for their room and board back then. . . . now the black just want room and board for no work. . . .

That's another reason why it's good to be white/male/wealthy. They can head a company, make NOTHING of the company, get a severence package from the company worth millions and essentially get room and board "for no work" by purchasing a beachfront property with the loot. It's good being white/male/wealthy.

Asian-Americans are an even smaller minority, yet they have their act together. "Disadvantaged" AA should watch and learn what Asians do differently from blacks so that maybe some day, the "disadvantaged" can be productive instead of a liability.

^^^Kudos to Asians! I love their work ethic! Whites can learn from them too. What I don't like is wealthy white men from the U.S. who send the jobs they create overseas then turn around and tell those who can't find a job in the U.S. that they need to find one! Then have the nerve to ask po' folks to buy their "Made In China" products. And we're supposed to respect them.

White007:


That's another reason why it's good to be white/male/wealthy. They can head a company, make NOTHING of the company, get a severence package from the company worth millions and essentially get room and board "for no work" by purchasing a beachfront property with the loot. It's good being white/male/wealthy.

maybe the do a #$%$poor job, but you cant say they didnt work, the studied, went to college, and worked their way up the ranks of the company, being a poor manager doesnt mean your lazy

^^^ Ever heard of Bernie Madoff? He's just one corporate crook of MANY

Yes, they expect us to respect them. The wealthy white men file bankrupt but still live high on the hog. Everybody else files bankrupt and they have to wait 7 years to get their credit and life back. Boy, wealthy white men truly have it made!


The only thing most black men have more than wealthy white men is sex appeal.

White007:

Yes, they expect us to respect them. The wealthy white men file bankrupt but still live high on the hog. Everybody else files bankrupt and they have to wait 7 years to get their credit and life back. Boy, wealthy white men truly have it made!


The only thing most black men have more than wealthy white men is sex appeal.

Yeah a man that can't get a job, and who's biggest ambition is life is to be a love-vendor or Drug Kingpin is oh so sexy, . sounds like a bunch of "hatin'" on succesful, intelligent whites. . . yes most exectivies are white, and yes some have to file for protections or go out of business, corps to fail. . . .welcome to CAPITALISM

Aringarosa:

Yeah a man that can't get a job, and who's biggest ambition is life is to be a love-vendor or Drug Kingpin is oh so sexy, . sounds like a bunch of "hatin'" on succesful, intelligent whites. . . yes most exectivies are white, and yes some have to file for protections or go out of business, corps to fail. . . .welcome to CAPITALISM

Not hatin' on intelligent whites (esp. women) or even wealthy white men, just thinking about how this country has set everyone up -- including you -- into thinking that CAPITALISM works on every level all of the time, Then people look at their 401k that they relied on for retirement that has dwindled because these so-called 'intelligent' wealthy white men who they trusted with their senior years inflated the success of their stock portfolios, had to come clean, now they are gone to severance pay heaven of gated communities and Florida beaches. It's good being a wealthy white male.

insisted on Negro, with a capital N

[size=30pt]N[/size][size=5pt]egro[/size]

As if capitalizing it makes the word any more ideal. How would it be more dignified to be called a capital-N-Negro than to be called an African?

As for the topic, I agree that those black Americans that prefer the term black American to African American have a good rationale for that preference, but the truth is that when push comes to shove, they are still going to be identified in some way or another with their distant relatives on the other continent. That's just the reality. Rejecting the "Africa" part because it's distant and disconnected to their present may indeed make sense, but others (the non capital-Ns of America) will still connect them to Africa regardless. All "Negros", "blacks", "coloreds", or whatever we want to call ourselves, will always have an African link even if we were living on the moon or in a space colony somewhere.

jellyloveb:

My Friend Parents were born in the united States of America; They are of mixed blood- African slave--Slave master-Cherokee Indian- Their children were born in Germany, What are they?

Theyre Black. And if youre black, youre African. End of story.

C'mon, youre from Biloxi, that should have been an easy one for you!

White007:

Not hatin' on intelligent whites (esp. women) or even wealthy white men, just thinking about how this country has set everyone up -- including you -- into thinking that CAPITALISM works on every level all of the time, Then people look at their 401k that they relied on for retirement that has dwindled because these so-called 'intelligent' wealthy white men who they trusted with their senior years inflated the success of their stock portfolios, had to come clean, now they are gone to severance pay heaven of gated communities and Florida beaches. It's good being a wealthy white male.

Man, you seem to understand how the system works. A Giant ponzi scheme always waiting to burst over and over and OVER again.

Aringarosa:

Yeah a man that can't get a job, and who's biggest ambition is life is to be a love-vendor or Drug Kingpin is oh so sexy,  . sounds like a bunch of "hatin'" on succesful, intelligent whites. . . yes most exectivies are white, and yes some have to file for protections or go out of business, corps to fail. . . .welcome to CAPITALISM

You have some points. But you still seem to be in denial on how the system works.

Btw, those AA should get off their as.ses and stop thinking that Di.ck will get them everything. In fact, the man with the Doough , get the real model babes. They should ask Hugly Donald Trump with that his artificial hair and George Soros with his tortoise old face

If we are going to blame the "system" I would like to know how those Asians are able to make it within the same System

dayokanu:

If we are going to blame the "system" I would like to know how those Asians are able to make it within the same System

Because a huge chunk of the system has been sold to Asians in their respective countries and thus the cycle continues. The economy has shifted hands. Money doesn't burn, it only changes hands.

The more you look, the less you see dimwit .  Get out of your trailer and you will see the light . Life is not all about partying and drinking with hillbillies