African? American? Both? Or neither? “Black” seems to be an accepted hybrid term that falls short of claiming either entity yet still denotes exceptionalism in this society.

Nonetheless, this ambiguity isn’t entirely neutral, as black people generally seem prone to distance themselves more from Africa, than America — either consciously or sub-consciously.

So says Malik Washington in his NPR piece Embracing The African In African-American.

Yes, but not for the reasons he thinks.

For me, the choice to identify as Black rather than as African-American isn’t a rejection of my African descent. It’s an embrace of the fact that my condition — how I perceive the world, how I relate to the world, how I am perceived by actual Africans, as well as my familial history, and racial identity — is distinctly American.

The story of how I got here is wrapped up in the history of the “New World,” and the United States. Some of my ancestors were (we think) from France, possibly England, Ireland or Scotland. Some were Cherokee. Some were undoubtedly west African. My family roots extend at least five generations into the soil of North and South Carolina, perhaps as far back as the 1700s. That’s an American condition — in both the “Western Hemisphere” sense and the “United States” sense. There isn’t much African about it.

As Ana Paula da Silva writes in, Black tourism in Brazil, a post I return to regularly when I think about black American racial identity:

Having pestered many Americans about the topic, it seems to me that heritage can best be described as a myth-making attempt to fix claims to certain elements of history as personal or collective property. It thus disturbs me when black Americans come to Bahia in search of their heritage. What they seem to be saying is that Bahia — and by extension, Brazil — makes no useful sense on its own terms and holds little interest for them except as it fits into their personal mythologies of identity.

Swap “Brazil” for “Africa” and you begin to understand my issues with identifying as an “African-American” or as an “African.”

“African-American” is too nebulous to be meaningful. “African” is just inaccurate. I am not — and most black Americans are not — African. Africans aren’t “African.” They’re Nigerian or Ghanaian or Moroccan or Zimbabwean. They’re Yoruba, Hausa, Akan, Ashanti, Berber, Tuareg, or Shona. Africans don’t become “African” (or “black,” for that matter) until they move to Europe or the United States or Canada — places where the brown skin common to peoples of the continent are visibly different and “Othered.”

Not only does “African-American” feel to me like an acquiescence to the idea that black people aren’t wholly American, but, like “African,” it turns a complex continent with over 50 and roughly 2000 ethno-linguistic groups into an imagined monolith. It ignores African cultures and history for the sake of making black Americans feel good. And it also erases a rich black American history of resistance and perseverance.

Still, I get the need to claim an ethnic origin. I, like many post-Civil Rights Era black Americans, had my identity crisis phase. At one time, I embraced “African-American” in part, because “black,” on its surface, felt empty.

“Black,” after all, is an arbitrary racial designation. It’s a color. It lacks any sort of ethnic specificity.

“Black” does not, however, lack a history.

I identify as “black” now because I understand that race is a construct rooted in history and bound by circumstance. In Brazil, for example, I might be moreno or mulato because of my mixed ancestry and light skin color. In the United States, I am legally and culturally black. My blackness is defined partly by my African ancestry, but mostly by U. S. history, culture, and law.

So while “African-American” acknowledges my geographic origins, “black,” particularly when used with “American,” recognizes that my cultural worldview is shaped by my experiences in the United States. It says not only do I belong here, but that I am of this country.

Also see:

• On institutionalized racism and global politics
• On privilege
• When ‘American’ is not enough

American anthropology professor Bobby Vaughn, who runs the website Afro Mexico, says research shows that Afro-Mexicans outnumbered those of European descent up until 1810 and by a factor of roughly 2:1 until the 1700s.

From Mexico’s lost culture on Global Post.

‘The Beige and the Black’: Segregation in Marriage

Twelve years ago, the New York Times magazine published a piece by Michael Lind on race, intermarriage, and demographic trends titled The Beige and the Black.

According to Lind, demographic trends suggest there will not going to be a nonwhite majority in the 21st century. Rather, there is going to be a mostly white mixed-race majority. After all, For the 25-34 age group, only 8 percent of black men marry outside their race. Less than 4 percent of black women do so.

And thanks to our history of race and law in this country, any portion of black lineage makes you black. Those bi-racial black people will be legally excluded from this mixed-race majority, and could well be excluded culturally and economically. As Lind explains:

On the positive side, the melting away of racial barriers between Asians, Latinos and whites will prevent a complete Balkanization of American society into tiny ethnic groups. On the negative side, the division between an enormous, mixed-race majority and a black minority might be equally unhealthy. The new mixed-race majority, even if it were predominantly European in ancestry, probably would not be moved by appeals to white guilt. Some of the new multiracial Americans might disingenuously invoke an Asian or Hispanic grandparent to include themselves among the victims rather than the victimizers. Nor would black Americans find many partners for a rainbow coalition politics, except perhaps among recent immigrants.

This may be the most curious twist to our discussions of immigration and the ‘browning’ of America. The degree to which immigrants are assimilated is determined by a mix of educational attainment, ethnic and national origin, length of time in the United States — and perhaps most importantly — color. A 2000 New York Times piece Best of Friends, Worlds Apart illustrates the issue well with its story of two Cuban immigrants, one black and one white.

With this current wave of immigrants — from Central and South America, from Mexico, from Africa, from the Caribbean, from Asia — I wonder to what degree they will become accepted, assimilated or marginalized over generations. And I wonder what that means for whiteness, blackness, and America’s handling of race.

Oppression renames its victims, brands them as a farmer brands his cattle with a common signature. It always aims to subvert the individual spirit and the humanity of the victim; and the victim will more or less struggle to remove oppression and be free.

Nigerian author Chinua Achebe in his essay “Spelling Our Proper Name,” in his book The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays

Verdicts about high-pitched movies from black viewers and public figures are usually swift and decisive — “Do the Right Thing,” “The Color Purple,” and the recent Robert Downey Jr. performance in “Tropic Thunder” come to mind. But that’s not what happened this time out. That’s partly because the embrace of “Precious” by the white film establishment has been a bit disorienting for black folk, even off-putting. But it’s also because the tough stuff in “Precious,” whether you like the movie or not, is striking chords of recognition for many black people that are making them not angry or enthusiastic, but uncertain. That’s new territory.

Black folks want to see more representations of “us” on screen. The question is, which “us” gets to be most visible? Also from the piece:

Nonetheless, Wright decries the movie for its lack of what he calls “achiever values.” And here we get into the thorny issue of class. For black people that means not solely money and education, but a concern about how we are being represented in public. How blacks are represented in movies always galvanizes such concern, and “Precious” is no exception.

[Via Faboomama's Friendfeed]

Also see: To Blacks, Precious Is ‘Demeaned’ or ‘Angelic’ from the New York Times (log-in may be required)

I voted for Obama. I celebrated his victory and I might just take the day off (or at least work from home) on Inauguration Day. But it took me a while to become comfortable with his campaign, in part because of the reasons Debra Dickerson articulated nearly a year ago.

I can’t and won’t revoke his membership in the American Society of Black Folks, of course. But I do think his heritage that is both black immigrant and Midwestern white gives him a perspective on life and on blackness that most black Americans — that is, those of us descended from Africans enslaved in the United states — don’t necessarily enjoy.

Barack Obama is “Black by Choice.” He is the son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother, which makes him racially black, though not culturally so. He was also raised by white folks from Kansas with stints in Indonesia and Hawaii. Have you checked the percentage of black Americans in Hawaii lately? That black Americans are almost non-existent in Indonesia doesn’t need to be stated.

Now Obeezy could easily have cultivated a distinctly bi-racial identity as so many bi-racial and bi-cultural children do. He easily could have cultivated an incidentally or accidentally black identity because of the demographics of the cities in which he was raised.

And yet, he chose to return to his African first name rather than be known as the far less foreign, far more familiar-sounding “Barry.” He chose to work as a community organizer on Chicago’s south side. He chose to attend a predominantly black church with a sort of crazy preacher. And he chose to marry a black woman from the south side of Chicago no less.

Because it was a matter of choice and not upbringing, Obama also had the freedom to choose which portions of black identity he wanted to claim. If I had to guess, I would say being black in mostly-white environment lead to some cognitive dissonance that allowed him to adopt some portions of a black American cultural identity (collectivism, social justice, and bou(r)gie Negro code-speak, for example) while eschewing the negative stereotypes of blackness.

And by crafting his own black identity and becoming president of the United States, perhaps Obama has — as so many other black immigrants and bi-racial blacks have — expanded our collective conceptions of what black is.

Related posts here

• Dear cousin Chris
• Dear Black Entrepreneurs (especially the ones behind Blackbird):
• In defense (um, sort of) of Geraldine Ferraro

Related content elsewhere

• The End of White America? from The Atlantic
• Black immigrants of the Caribbean: an invisible and forgotten community from Adult Learning on AccessMyLibrary.com
• Lisa D. McGill. Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation from African American Review on FindArticles.com