I’m pretty sure this was brought up but i’m new here and need to get this off my chest.
I can’t stand when we are called African Americans.It’s something the civil rights generation ushered in aka Oldddd Nigggasss.I do recognize there were elders who was riders, Shout out to The elders Neely Fuller, Francis Cress Welsing Dr Claude Anderson just to name a few. I feel like African American has hurt us more than helped us lately .That Elon musk being referred to as the first African American to buy majority stake in Twitter was it for me..
Is African American really that bad or inaccurate? When you look in the mirror and see your hair texture does that not say African to you?
I like both Black American and African American because the things this nation hates about me are everything that comes from Africa.
My full lips, my course hair texture, my height, the way my calf muscles are built, my broad shoulders, my wide nose, all that is African.
Everything that makes me Black in this society is everything I got from Africa. The issue is we are a mixture of lineages, we have Black people who were here already, Black people who came from the Mali Empire, Black people who came here enslaved and they all got mixed and so we used African American as a catch all.
I think we have to look at this in a bifurcated manner. There’s African Cultures and African Geneaology. Black Americans are genetically African but culturally we have diverged due to our circumstance.
It's an extremely sloppy & misleading terminology. Notice, how other countries in the Diaspora are allowed to be referenced, according to their distinct lineages, w/o affixing "African" to it. How often does one hear of African Haitians? African Jamaicans? Etc.? African American, while opening the gateway to non-Black Africans that obtain citizenship here (as stated before, Musk, among others), also dilutes the distinct experience/heritage found in the Black American Descendants of Chattel Slavery: historically known as Freedmen.
Let’s tackle this in parts. When we say African American we are saying we are an African people in the European country known as the USA, how is that sloppy? We use the word “African” because we don’t go back to one single African country as a group. Some Black Americans are Igbo, some are Yoruba, some are Akan, some are Mande and a lot of are mixture of them all.
Now if you and group of other Black Americans went to Brazil you would just call yourself Americans because you would all trace back to a single country from a Brazilian’s standpoint. That’s why a Jamaican says “I’m Jamaican-American” because they trace back to a single country from the standpoint of an American.
I think it’s dangerous to detach ourselves from Africa. We are an African people…when you see a Black American amongst the tribes they descend from you cannot even tell them apart.