[...] The Washington Post reports that "a group financed by a major Republican contributor" has been running ads "on radio stations with largely black audiences" that denounce the Democratic nominee for marrying a person of pallor. Says the ad's narrator: "His wife says she's an African American. While technically true, I don't believe a white woman, raised in Africa, surrounded by servants, qualifies."
The current popularity of African-American as a synonym for black dates back to 1988. This is an Associated Press dispatch from Dec. 20 of that year:
- A group of black leaders, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, says members of their race would prefer to be called African-Americans rather than blacks.
"Just as we were called colored, but were not that, and then Negro, but not that, to be called black is just as baseless," Jackson said at a news conference Monday after a meeting of the black leaders.
"To be called African-Americans has cultural integrity," he said. "It puts us in our proper historical context. Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base. African-Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity."
... "There are Armenian-Americans and Jewish Americans and Arab-Americans and Italian-Americans," Jackson said. "And with a degree of accepted and reasonable pride, they connect their heritage to their mother country and where they are now." ...
The Rev. Willie Barrow, president of Operation PUSH, said she will start using the term immediately.
"I'm African-American just like the Polish are Polish-American and Italians are Italian-American," she said. "It's something we've all agreed upon and it's just great."
Yet Mrs. Heinz Kerry is certainly African-American in the same sense that a Polish or Italian immigrant is Polish-American or Italian-American.
Another prominent African-American is Barack Obama, the next senator from Illinois. Obama's mother was a white native American, but his father, who abandoned the family when Barack was a child, was a black Kenyan. So it was odd that when Tim Russert interviewed Obama on "Meet the Press" three weeks ago, he asked: "What was it like being someone who was part African-American being raised by white parents?"
Part African-American? Obama is part African, but he's African-American full stop (as the British, though not the British-Americans, say). Likewise, our mother's Swedish heritage makes us Swedish-American although our father isn't even Scandinavian. Russert presumably was trying to be politically correct and meant "part black"--a designation that raises all sorts of other issues (the "one-drop rule" and all that) that are beyond the scope of this item.
Anyway, it strikes us that using African-American as a substitute for black obscures what is unique about the black experience in America. With some exceptions (including Obama), black Americans are the descendants of slaves, not immigrants. Obviously one would rather be an immigrant than a slave, but slavery was a discredit to America, not to the people who were enslaved or their descendants.
Today black Americans are full citizens, but achieving that status required a long, hard struggle to overcome slavery and the discrimination that remained in its wake. This is an epic accomplishment, a heritage of which to be proud. [...]
| That was from James Taranto's Best of the Web column in the Wall Street Journal
posted in articles on August 17, 2004 12:49 AM | t (0)
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