African-AmericanMy buddy Dawn notes that John Kerry’s wife once called herself African-American (she was born in Mozambique). Which raises an interesting culturo-linguistic question: What does that mean?
The WSJ article cited to by Dawn begs the question: why can Colin Powell, son of Jamaican immigrants, call himself African-American, but Teresa Heinz, who was born in Africa, can’t? The answer is, because the term has been co-opted to mean something other than what it literally refers to.
“African-American” has come to replace “black” in common parlance to refer to those people who have inherited the dark (pun acknowledged) legacy of slavery, either by descent—or, more commonly—by operation of the bigotry that continues to exist in the wake of emancipation. It refers to Africa only in a very attenuated way. Many—particularly hip hop fans—will remember the emergence in the ‘80s of what I will call “Africanism”—the adoption of African themes and cultural signifiers as a new “black” identity. This Africanism, and the term “African-American”, are only tenuously connected to the actual continent of Africa—what they represent is an attempt to create a new, positive cultural identity for a group of people whose history in this country is one of undeserved degradation and shame. But in the end it is neither truly African nor truly American.
Witness, for example, the “African American” man who’s DNA never saw the Dark Continent. And, of course, the lily-white ketchup heiress born in Mozambique. Which of them is truly “African American”? What about the white man whose parents and grandparents were born and raised in South Africa? Or the great-grandchild of slaves whose skin is just as white? Or my friend, the first-generation Brazilian-American whose skin is as dark as that of my other friend, the first-generation Nigerian? The Brazilian almost certainly descends from slaves, while my Nigerian friend descends from (unenslaved) royalty. To many, they are both “black” (or to the more polite but equally simple-minded, “African American").
So now I see two problems: First, if we accept this (ambiguous) definition of “African American”, then what do we call people from Africa who most clearly don’t fit that definition, like Teresa Heinz? White Africans? Second, and as underscored by the hypothetical answer to my first question, what is the effect of this appropriation of the term today? With miscegenation and globalization blurring the biological and cultural lines between peoples, does it make sense to keep trying to draw lines where there should never have been any in the first place?
Read Less...
