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What blacks want to be called (the never ending saga)
Some blacks are resisting the name “African-American” and would prefer being called black. It wasn’t that way in the late 1980s, when Jesse Jackson proposed that blacks be called African-Americans, and virtually the entire mainstream society, white and black, instantly complied. Imagine having such influence. Jackson must have felt like the king of our culture when that happened. There are positive things about the current pushback against “African-American.” The blacks who feel this way are not blaming whites for the label, and they are not saying that the name denigrates them, as they said in the past about “black,” “Negro,” and “colored.” They are just saying that they don’t relate to the African part of “African-American,” because they feel themselves to be Americans.
However, does any of this make any difference? Whether individual blacks identify as Africans, as or African-Americans, or (making the hearts of mainstream conservatives go pitter-patter) simply as Americans, the fact remains that as a community blacks are still dragging our society down, and will continue to drag it down so long as whites keep giving them power in our politics and our culture far beyond anything they have earned or are able to earn.
Dan writes:
Unfortunately the reascension of “black” to replace “African-American” has the effect of denying us the enjoyment of such musings as Bill O’Reilly’s pondering some months ago whether there were any African-Americans serving in the Japanese army during World War II. Likewise I recall when American bobsledder Vonetta Flowers became, according to an NBC announcer, the first African-American of any country to win a gold medal in the Winter Olympics. I’ll miss those gems.LA replies:
And then there was the liberal acquaintance years ago who, in telling me about her recent trip to Norway, enthusiastically spoke of the “African-Americans” she had seen there. Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 06, 2012 02:32 PM | Send Email entry |