Why do we have to call them African Americans?
from 
JoeUser Forums
JoeUser Forums
My friend's article Link made me wonder this yet again: Why did we used to call them (please forgive me) Niggers, then Negroes, then Blacks, and now African Americans?
I remember a friend in high school who was unmistakably dark-skinned, the darkest a person can possibly be. She was a friend, and of course I didn't think anything of her race because we were simply friends. So one day in casual conversation she said that none of her ancestors are from Africa. She said that she is completely Jamaican. That's interesting. Fine, I thought. I wondered if at some point her Jamaican ancestors hadn't come from Africa, but I know virtually nothing about migration, so I didn't think about it for too long.
My point is, is "African American" a fair label for our dark-skinned friends? Maybe they're not all from Africa. Then what should we call them? I personally was fine with "black," and I even thought that "negro" was a perfectly acceptable categorization until my aunt went raving mad at me for describing to her 4-year-old daughter that the girl in the pink dress on the Chutes-n-Ladders game was a negro. My aunt heard me from another room, and she lost it, then right away she had a long talk with her daughter to re-indoctrinate her to the politically correct way to refer to the darker race: "African American."
Sheesh.
By the way, black people call each other black (and worse things). But goodness forbid if a white person uses any such taboo word. That would be racist, right? Why does our society still walk on eggshells about this?
I remember a friend in high school who was unmistakably dark-skinned, the darkest a person can possibly be. She was a friend, and of course I didn't think anything of her race because we were simply friends. So one day in casual conversation she said that none of her ancestors are from Africa. She said that she is completely Jamaican. That's interesting. Fine, I thought. I wondered if at some point her Jamaican ancestors hadn't come from Africa, but I know virtually nothing about migration, so I didn't think about it for too long.
My point is, is "African American" a fair label for our dark-skinned friends? Maybe they're not all from Africa. Then what should we call them? I personally was fine with "black," and I even thought that "negro" was a perfectly acceptable categorization until my aunt went raving mad at me for describing to her 4-year-old daughter that the girl in the pink dress on the Chutes-n-Ladders game was a negro. My aunt heard me from another room, and she lost it, then right away she had a long talk with her daughter to re-indoctrinate her to the politically correct way to refer to the darker race: "African American."
Sheesh.
By the way, black people call each other black (and worse things). But goodness forbid if a white person uses any such taboo word. That would be racist, right? Why does our society still walk on eggshells about this?
