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 onto 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.”
Smith’s parents are from Mississippi and North Carolina. “I can’t recall any of them telling me anything about Africa,” Smith said. “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,” said George, 38. “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. 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.”
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 an 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.
Afro-American was briefly in vogue in the 1970s. But it was soon overshadowed by African-American, which first sprouted among the black intelligentsia.
Mary Frances Berry, a former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, remembers being at a 1988 gathering of civil-rights groups organized by the Rev. Jesse 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.
Today, Edelin says she thinks the term is “still evolving.”
“I’m content, for now, with African and American,” she said. “But that’s not to say that it won’t change again.”
