This term African American is so stupid. Is a person of West Indian descent such as Colin Powell African American? I'm glad that some blacks are waking up to this.
To this end, Asian-American, Native-American,etc should also be done away with.
At times, just to be ornery when asked to check one of these racial blocks, I would check Óther and say “Irish American “....: : )
Well, I'm a melanin enriched American, so I may as well chime in here.
We called ourselves 'negro' when I was a young child, but for a whole lot of reasons you might not be familiar with, most of us black folks weren't all that keen on the term. For one, it was a term that was more or less assigned to us - not one we chose for ourselves. Secondly, the word simply means 'black' in Spanish.
When negroes started calling themselves 'black' in the 1960s, it was a causative act, and an affirmation of personal and group identity and pride. It caught on nearly instantly, and stuck hard. It made a lot more sense to most of us, than the term, 'negro'.
Over the next 20 years or so, black folks did a lot of reflecting on where they came from. Remember the movie, "Roots"? I believe it was somewhere around that time that more radical blacks began looking to further individuate black people from the rest of America. Adopting the term, 'African-American' accomplished that nicely, and served the purposes of the hard left, to further consolidate their hold on that segment of the American people (and their votes).
Even before I rediscovered my core conservatism, I hated the term, 'African-American', and never accepted it. In my mind, I've always been nothing more than an American. I've got ancestral roots that go back to other continents, but so does every other American. Should they all hyphenate their identity like 'African-Americans' do?
It's just silly, and I don't support it. It's just an insidious way to divide Americans. Are we a country, or are we not? It doesn't matter where ones ancestors came from. You're here now, and you either identify with this country or you don't.
I always wondered how those from the Caribbean felt calling themselves AA when their origins are far from Africa? I think the best argument I ever heard was between a foreign exchange student from Africa and an American black.It was like who’s on first....the exchange student kept asking “where are you from in Africa” and the black student kept saying “I’m not from African I am African American”....