Many refuse to call themselves African-American

ASSOCIATED PRESS

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 on to a name from the past: "Black."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson is shown above at the Feb. 5 Super Bowl in Indianapolis. Jackson is widely credited with taking African-American mainstream in 1988. (LIONEL HAHN/ABACA PRESS/MCT)

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.

No ‘African’ connection

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," said Smith, whose parents are from Mississippi and North Carolina. "I can’t recall any of them telling me anything about Africa. They told me a whole lot about where they grew up in Macomb County and Shelby, N.C."

Miami resident: ‘Not really us’

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," George said. "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," continued George, who is 38. "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."

‘Negars’ first

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 the 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.

‘Grassroots move’

Then, in the 1960s, "Black" came back — as an expression of pride, a strategy to defy oppression.

"Every time Black had been mentioned since slavery, it was bad," says Mary Frances Berry, a University of Pennsylvania history professor and former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Reclaiming the word "was a grassroots move, and it was oppositional. It was like, ‘In your face.’"

Afro-American was briefly in vogue in the 1970s, and lingers today in the names of some newspapers and university departments. But it was soon overshadowed by African-American, which first sprouted among the Black intelligentsia.

‘Cultural offensive’

The Rev. Jesse Jackson is widely credited with taking African-American mainstream in 1988, before his second presidential run.

Berry remembers being at a 1988 gathering of civil rights groups organized by 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.

Edelin says today that there was no intent to exclude people born in other countries, or to eliminate the use of Black: "It was an attempt to start a cultural offensive, because we were clearly at that time always on the defensive."

"We said, this is kind of a compromise term," she continued. "There are those among us who don’t want to be referred to as African. And there also those among us who don’t want to be referred to as American. This was a way of bridging divisions among us or in our ideologies so we can move forward as a group."

Lots of buzz

Jackson, who at the time may have been the most-quoted Black man in America, followed through with the plan.

"Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical, cultural base," Jackson told reporters at the time. "African-Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity."

The effect was immediate. "Back in those days we didn’t talk about things going viral, but that’s what you would say today. It was quite remarkable," said the columnist Clarence Page, then a reporter. "It was kind of like when Black Power first came in the ‘60s, there was all kinds of buzz among Black folks and White folks about whether or not I like this."

Historical value

Page liked it — he still uses it interchangeably with Black — and sees an advantage to changing names.

"If we couldn’t control anything else, at least we could control what people call us," Page said. "That’s the most fundamental right any human being has, over what other people call you. (African-American) had a lot of psychic value from that point of view."

It also has historical value, said Irv Randolph, managing editor of the Philadelphia Tribune, a Black newspaper that uses both terms: "It’s a historical fact that we are people of African descent."

"African-American embraces where we came from and where we are now," he said. "We are Americans, no doubt about that. But to deny where we came from doesn’t make any sense to me."

42% prefer Black

Twenty-four years after Jackson popularized African-American, it’s unclear what term is preferred by the community. A series of Gallup polls from 1991 to 2007 showed no strong consensus for either Black or African-American.

In a January 2011 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 42 percent of respondents said they preferred Black, 35 percent said African-American, 13 percent said it doesn’t make any difference, and 7 percent chose "some other term."

Political tool

In a Senate race against Obama in 2004, Alan Keyes implied that Obama could not claim to share Keyes’ "African-American heritage" because Keyes’ ancestors were slaves. During the Democratic presidential primary, some Hillary Clinton supporters made the same charge.

Last year, Herman Cain, then a Republican presidential candidate, sought to contrast his roots in the Jim Crow south with Obama’s history, and he shunned the label African-American in favor of "American Black conservative." Rush Limbaugh mocked Obama as a "halfrican-American."