There was a time when "Black" was considered offensive and "African-American" was the generally-approved nomenclature. You seem to be implying that the "-American" pattern emerged as some sort of white conspiracy to paint everyone else as less American, but my understanding is that the opposite is true. Language and social preferences evolve over time, and that one has simply come and gone as the "correct" option of the day.
As a generally "white" person (of roughly western European descent), I will happily use any set of labels that keeps people from glaring at me. I feel pretty strongly that unpleasant language is a symptom of prejudice, not a cause. If changing words could change hearts and minds, I think we would have seen it happen by now.
> There was a time when "Black" was considered offensive and "African-American" was the generally-approved nomenclature.
This culminated in an epic television moment when an American interviewer asked Kris Akabusi, a black British 400m runner, what his victory meant "as a British African-American".
> There was a time when "Black" was considered offensive and "African-American" was the generally-approved nomenclature.
Eh, this is a little inaccurate - I don't think anyone but white people worked themselves up about this, and the distinction between "black" and "african american" was made because Americans with slave ancestry are not the only people who have dark skin color. It's also still in use and hasn't gone anywhere. AFAIK you've always been able to refer to a black person as black without offense, but of course, people have used that as a mild slur or with insulting connotations.
Whether or not it was mainly white people who did this, I do remember when I was a kid (late 90s/early 2000s) there was a hard push to just swap "black" for "African-American" no matter how little sense it made, because "black" was considered offensive. It's how we got one particular addition to the "ignorant American" meme videos, where people would go on vacation to Europe or Africa and call a black person born and living there "African-American". It's also why Elon Musk generally isn't considered African-American, even though he has a better claim to the label than most.
> here was a hard push to just swap "black" for "African-American" no matter how little sense it made, because "black" was considered offensive.
This was a hard push from white people toward other white people, about being offended on the behalf of black people. Black people have never liked the term African-American, and most don't use it. The reasons why white people on either side of the "debate" wouldn't notice this or would operate as if this weren't true are left as an exercise for the reader.
Here's a stupid article pretending that black people who still call themselves black in 2012 are space aliens or Amish, when there was never a point when black people didn't call themselves black: Some blacks insist: 'I'm not African-American'https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna46264191
> This was a hard push from white people toward other white people, about being offended on the behalf of black people. Black people have never liked the term African-American, and most don't use it.
Doesn't matter because that's not the point of my comment. The person I was responding to said:
> and the distinction between "black" and "african american" was made because Americans with slave ancestry are not the only people who have dark skin color.
My point is there was no distinction. At the time, in the US, those two terms referred to the same group of people. The push was to replace "black" with "African-American", not to use whichever term was more appropriate.
These narratives were not driven by black people. I know what you are referring to. It was never considered an offensive term by anyone who had any stake in it, it was purely contrived and performative nonsense for being “aware” when it was signaling only that they absolutely were not. Just my 2c as a PoC
Same goes for Indian vs Native American, which this thread started off with. Few Indians are offended by the phrase “Native American”, but it is cumbersome and not used to describe themselves. They’re perfectly fine with the term “Indian” and prefer it, even if it is etymologically wrong (sorry to the South Asians out there).
It’s an outsider combining in and saying “no, people can’t call you black” [or “Indian”] that is weirdly controlling and oppressive.
I wondered about how the majority of people belonging to those two groups felt about it.
I am quite surprised that "Indian" is still acceptable in a country as sensitive about vocabulary as the US - its very much a colonial term. Then again "America" is, if named after Vespucci, is named after a slave owner and trader which does not seem to bother anyone (which is odd in an age when other things are being renamed).
I prefer "Native American" because, as British Sri Lankan (lived in both countries) Indian just has a different meaning to me.
> It’s an outsider combining in and saying “no, people can’t call you black” [or “Indian”] that is weirdly controlling and oppressive.
Yes, and we have that problem in the UK too. I find it very amusing that South Asians (particularly those actually in South Asia who are not much subject to western influence) will use phrases about themselves (e.g. "coloured") that would shock westerners.
We are also getting a lot more policing of language in the UK. It is actually quite oppressive, and disadvantages recent immigrants (and people from the wrong background) who do not know the right vocabulary.
> I prefer "Native American" because, as British Sri Lankan (lived in both countries) Indian just has a different meaning to me.
Well that's the thing, you're not indigenous American, so you don't really get a say. Neither am I, btw. We're getting into moral discussions here, but if anyone should be granted one thing, it's the right to choose for themselves what group name they prefer. There wasn't, generally speaking, a common name in the indigenous American languages for the people of the americas, separate and distinct from the word for "people" which would have included the invading conquistadors from Europe. So “Indian” was as good as any, even though it was already the name of a people halfway around the world. [Although to be pedantic, it was meant to refer to the people of modern-day Indonesia, Malaysia, and South-East Asia, not the Indian subcontinent. He thought at first he'd landed in Indonesia. Then he thought maybe Japan or China. He was a confused dude.]
It is right and proper that people should be able to decide for themselves what they want others to call them, and the indigenous people of the United States prefer to be called "Indians." The clunky term "Native American" was repurposed from a very different meaning to apply to Indians during the civil rights era, not by Indians themselves but by misguided activists and civil rights fighters who patronizingly thought they were doing tribes a favor by decolonizing their language. Ironically, the very act of mandating what terms they should use to describe themselves is peak colonialism.
If you go to tribal land and talk to the people living there--and I've had some wonderful conversations with people on the Hopi and Navajo reservations--they'll tell you that they prefer that you use their specific tribal name to identify them, but if you must group multiple tribes together then they prefer the term Indian, they've always referred to themselves as Indian, and they have no desire to change that, thank you very much.
> “We were enslaved as American Indians, we were colonized as American Indians, and we will gain our freedom as American Indians and then we can call ourselves anything we damn please,”
- Russell Means, a Lakota activist, wrote in his 1998 essay, “I Am An American Indian, Not a Native American!” https://compusci.com/indian/
Mann’s introduction to (I think it was) 1491 has a section on his settling on “Indian” as his term in the book for (most of the—there’s some nuance) indigenous Americans and their decedents, and he doesn’t go into great detail, but it reads like he kept using “Native American” around… well, Indians, with whom he was speaking to learn more about topics for the book, and they consistently rolled their eyes and told him to just say “Indian”, so after a great deal of this he finally relented and settled on that as the most-OK term to use. I recall it because I found the passage amusing.
As a generally "white" person (of roughly western European descent), I will happily use any set of labels that keeps people from glaring at me. I feel pretty strongly that unpleasant language is a symptom of prejudice, not a cause. If changing words could change hearts and minds, I think we would have seen it happen by now.