Wish he were here. We desperately need vision from on high. My optician says mine is fine, so i'm headed up there to get a better view of where we've been in going back to look forward and see the future. Anything he can do, ...........
Regards.

...and although barnhart clarified the distinct histories of blacks in the UK vs. blacks in the U.S., it still didn't help clarify the term "African-American"...and its inherent problem of exclusion-by-definition. In most countries, a hyphenated name to describe ethnic/national affiliation makes sense -- as it usually refers to the a single immigration path. For example, immigrants to the U.S. who came directly from Ireland are referred to as Irish-American. Now if some of the ancestors of these Irish-Americans had immigrated to Ireland from Wales in the past, it would be immaterial in terms of naming or labeling. Irish-Americans with roots in Wales are never referred to as Welsh-American.

Now take my (please!)..... She was born in Jamaica and immigrated to the U.S. She includes herself in the group Jamaican-Americans (sometimes further shortened as "Jamericans"). When she is asked "Are you African-American", she answers "no". She is excluded from this group by definition. She is however a black American.

Although there is some argument to me made that "'African-American' is not to erase 'blackness'" -- that there is a reason for the collective pride of the decendents of the African slaves brought to this country -- I agree that the term "black" is more inclusive of the whole African diaspora.

-Michael Rose,
St. Paul, MN

I read KA Dilday's article in today's New York Times and found it informative and interesting. It also triggered my journey on the subject:

I'm an American male of Italian ancestry. While I love the food, I can't speak the language (except for a few curse words), and have never been to Italy.

Many immigrants from Europe, Americanized or changed their last names so they could speed up their acceptance and assimilation into the American culture with it's related economic opportunities.

There are few similaries between the way Africans and Italians landed on our shores, and no similariites once they began living here. The effects of our shameful history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination live with us today, but is the subject of another post.

This post is about assimilation. At the outset, I make the value judgment that assimilation is a good thing for immigrants from other lands because it turns foreigners into Americans, by learning the lauguage(eventually), and learning and contributing to the customs, culture and values of their new country. One of the values we learn as modern day Americans is that being an American is not how you look or dress, but what you believe (tolerance, understanding and respect and appreciation of diversity, a set of human rights we cherish, etc). While we often fall short of these goals, it's an ideal most of us aspire to as Americans. My favorite quotation is, " America is as good as the rest of the world put together because it is the rest of the world put together".

Growing up in New York City, everyone I know was a hyphenated American (Irish-American; Polish American; Jewish; American-Greek American; and Asian American ). There was one African-American who I saw from time to time but he didn't play stickball or other street games with us. He was usually w/ his parents or older sister. I used to think he had other friends, but I didn't know for sure.

My friends and I certainly didn't refer to each other by the hyphenated names above. We mostly called each other by our first names, or the insulting form of our ethnic backgrounds, though ethnicity was never a basis of forming friendship groups. I heard the "N' word occasionally, but it wasn't commonly used. However, I still held negative racial sterotypes in my mind while growing up( I'm guessing from internallizing the bigotry of the larger society at the time). I've overcome them intelliectually, but, more importantly, emotionally with awareness, understanding, respect and appreciation from living a racially integrated life.

As I became older and got more education and life experience, I realized how the assimilation of immigrants was working for the former Europeans, but not for African-Americans.

While doing graduate work at LSU, I saw the poverty of single parent mothers in Baton Rouge,Lousiana in the 1960's living in wooden shacks with newspaper to cover holes in the wall who wanted a good education for their children who also lived in these small, one room shacks. The less than human living conditions and human suffering shocked and changed me. As a child of a middle class, stable familty unit, I had no idea such severe poverty and inequality existed in America until that experience.

I changed career paths from a college professor, and returned to New York City to become first a social worker in Harlem, then a teacher in an inner-city public elementary school in Brooklyn.

While it was a rewarding career (teaching is a pure endeavor), and much better than chasing the almighty dollar as a reason for being, I don't believe anyone would say that America has fully assimilated African-Americans into the educational, economic, social and political mainstrem of America.

There is still much work to be done.

When reflecting on my youth, I usually say," I'm a child of the 60's.and my generation was going to save America from racism and militarism. Well, forty years later, we're 0 for 2 mostly because of Nixon, Reagan, and the two Bushes and their "southern strategy". But Barack Obama gives me hope that we're entering a post 'race-baiting for votes' period of our history because it no longer works. Frankly, I never thought I'd see this in my lifetime, and I couldn't be happier especially for my former students and their children.

I've lived through the changes regarding differing descriptions for Americans whose ancesters came from Africa; namely, Negro; Afro-American; Black; and African-American. I've never been comfortable with any of these descriptions because they decribe a sub-group of American citizenship, and work against unconditional or full assimilation in our thinking.

About 10 years ago, I saw a dark skinned British citizen on TV being interviewed in England who, in describing a racial issue in America, stated, "the Americans of African descent..........". When I heard that phrase I knew it was factually accurate, complete, not hyphenated, and fully consistent w/ the way Americans from other ancestries should also be described when background is relevant to the issue under consideration (ex, Americans of Italian descent; Americans of Asian descent, etc). There may be a change back and forth from county to continent in listing ancestry after the word "American" but we can forever end the conditioned or hyphenated American description for all Americans by using this accurate phrase.

I thank the British guy on TV for bringing clarity and accuracy to my description of fellow Americans and to K.A. Dilday for a thoughtful article that triggered my long journey for a unifying and assimilating descriptive principle for Americans.

Interesting article. Basically a call for a global pan-African identity, but worded in a way that won't 'alarm' white readers.

B. Amatullah
I can remember being colored, negro, dark skinned, black and yes even the n-word. Nobody wanted to be African when I grew up 5+ decades ago. On the streets black was acceptable because 'the blacker the berry- the sweeter the wine', but call one of us African and it was fight time. We have called each other black since slavery with disgust and acceptance. Check out Tyler Perry's older films, before he cleaned up his acts for T-V.

To be called African is an awakening that finally happened. Thank God!! I can be African American, ..of African descent, or just African. That is who I am and so were my ancestors- even though they forgot or lost it. My two year old vanilla-colored grandson with African features will have little confusion when defining himself a few years from now.

Hello KA Dilday, just wanted to let you know I read your article on nytimes and have now found this new website and interesting source of information. My beef with the term African-American is just that it is long. "Black" rolls off the tongue pretty easy, just like "white" or "Asian." Also, if my black friends/colleagues are African-American, then I should be European-American, which I think is a stupid term that no one is going to start using. I am proud to be of German and Irish descent, but if someone sees me on the street how else should they describe me but as "white?" Freckly? Short and stocky?
Also thanks for the interesting article about homosexuality in the Muslim/Arab world.

Dilday makes many good points, but many are theory or about how things should be instead of how they are. Some might say s/he talks like a well-meaning, educated white person. Good solutions are good to have, but you can only find them if you truly understand the problems at hand.

S/he says:
The term African-American was contrived to give black Americans a sense of having a historical link to Africa, since one of slavery’s many unhappy legacies is that most black Americans don’t know particulars about their origins. Black Americans whose ancestors arrived after slavery and who can pinpoint their country of origin are excluded from the definition — which is why, early in his campaign, people said Barack Obama wasn’t really African-American. Yet, since he has one parent from the African continent and one from the American continent, he is explicitly African-American.

I do not recall anyone saying Obama "isn't really African-American," and if anyone said so it was not common. Instead he was initially "not black enough," and there's a big difference between being "African-American" or even "Black" and having varied degrees of "blackness." Dilday is right in saying the term African-American was created to give Blacks a sense of a historic link to Africa, but that is something that should not be belittled. It can be frustrating to see Asian-Americans and Latino-Americans have what sometimes might seem as more sophistication for having better established links, and many white Americans have long assumed that Blacks have been completely washed from their African culture, in fact there are many aspects of the culture of the very Blacks whose ancestors were from Africa and later were slaves that is African, or at the very least more African than European. Note it is not impossible to hear Black Americans refer to White Americans as "European-Americans." What makes Whites different from Blacks is their Europe-derived culture: music would be an example.

The reason many African immigrants or Black Americans who have recent ancestors (parents, grandparents, etc) from Africa (or elsewhere outside the US) is because they themselves often do not want to be lumped in with the Black Americans/African-Americans. This can be for many reasons, for example wanting to show other Blacks how they have an especially special link with Mother Africa, or to let a White person know they do not want to be associated with the mainstream Black population given the perceptions many Whites may have. This is not unlike a White child letting it be known to his classmates that he has a parent from France or Germany, and that he speaks one of those languages with the parent in question, or a White man making sure an Asian-American woman he is interested in knows that despite his American accent, his parents are from Europe and he holds too passports, and so on. It is a question of feeling or looking more sophisticated, and IMHO understanding the desire by Black Americans to feel that kind of sophistication would be helpful in understanding Black America.

I would suggest that a good point of departure for understanding why there were initially suggestions that Obama "isn't black enough" would be understanding why (Nobel winning novelist) Toni Morrison wrote in the New Yorker that Bill Clinton was America's "first Black president."

African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.

Someone followed up on this:
When Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton “the first black president,” I knew what she meant. He had a kind of swagger, a kind of personal charisma and (in comparison to the other candidates on the ticket in 1992) a kind of “hip-ness” that smacked of negritude. Hanging out with Vernon Jordan, having power breakfasts with Ron Brown, clappin’ on beat with the choirs at black churches, Bill seemed like he could really hang. Even more telling, white conservatives hated him like they’d hate a black president. They disrespected him like they would a black president, virtually going through the man’s garbage looking for dirt. And they were obsessed by and jealous of Bill’s sexuality, just as white men have historically been obsessed by the sexuality and prowess of black men.

Very helpful and interesting reading would be an interview titled "Why blacks love Bill Clinton" in Salon.com, about "why [Bill] Clinton tops Colin Powell and Jesse Jackson in the eyes of black Americans and why it doesn't really matter whether [Bill] Clinton's sincere or not."

At any rate, whenever Bill Clinton is referred to as being Black and/or having a lot of "blackness," every reason ever cited refers to qualities or experiences that Obama does not have, and _that_ would be why Obama is not seen as being all that Black. I doubt he will ever be seen as being especially so, though I also imagine he may want to play down whatever blackness he has most of the time. In the meantime I recently saw a sign on a Black-owned business in San Francisco that said "You're Black enough for me, Barak."

Not exactly sure how I landed on this page, but I was looking for a way to email K.A. Dilday.

I read your article today in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, taken fromt eh New York Times. It was titled "Back to black".

Well, while you're idea of removing the term "African-American" from the English vocabulary, I think I have an even better idea.

How about eliminating the word black also? It sounds like you're just trading one word for another. Besides, words carry meaning that is created every time we speak. So if you just change words, it's only a matter of time until the word 'black' carries the meaning that the term 'African-American' has today.

Language is very powerful as you must know. It wasn't until I participated in this course called The Landmark Forum - www.landmarkeducation.com - that I realized that language literally creates people's reality. That is why I'm writing this to you. I recommend that course to you, BTW.

Here's a way I to illustrate what I am trying to communicate. BTW, several people have reported a similar example to me:

A white child has a black child as a friend. They grow together and spend a lot of time together. One day the mother of the white child drives her up to the school where they can see the black child standing there. The white child says "that's my friend". The mother says "the black girl?". This is the first time the white girl notices that her friend is black.

This is an example of how language creates reality. Nothing exists in the mind until it's put in there, and language is definitely a powerful way to do it. Like I said, many people have reported a similar experience. I have a friend right now who is Caucasian and raises a child of Chinese origin (very different looks). The child does not realize yet that she is "ethnically different". Some day she will. And how that will happen is that someone will describe it to her. Someone will say "why are you Asian when your mom isn't?"

So what I'm proposing is that we eliminate terms like Asian-American and African-American altogether. What have this distinction? We're all just people.

Yes, you may see where I am going with this. Ultimately I want to eliminate the term "American" because we are all just people. But that would be too radical of an approach. Let's start with eliminating the prefix that is completely unnecessary and racist, and call all Americans just Americans.

Then hopefully some day we'll learn that American is also a made-up label for people who have American citizenship. Hopefully some day we can call humans just "people". This was Martin Luther's King.

If we are able to eliminate words like "black" and "white" from our vocabulary, I can guarantee you that pretty soon we can no longer see black and white. We'll see just people. Then we might think that it's because "the black people intermarriaged with the white people and the colors have mixed"; perhaps not realizing the reality is created by language and it's actually our clean language that is allowing us to see ourselves for who we really are: just people.