Re: Whiteness?

> From: Raymond Brown
>
> At 2:19 am -0400 4/9/00, Nik Taylor wrote:
> >Raymond Brown wrote:
> >> Similarly would a 'white' Zimbabwean get classified as
> African-American.
> >> IF NOT, WHY NOT?
> >
> >Nope.  Egyptian-born Americans, for instance, aren't classified as
> >African-American.  African-American basically means an American whose
> >ancestors originated in Africa [of course, technically, that would make
> >*all* Americans African-Americans, since humanity originated in Africa
> >:-)], except for those whose ancestors originated in Northern Africa.
>
> Why should northern Africa be excluded?
>
> But even if we take Africa arbitrarily to mean 'sub-Saharan Africa', I
> still suspect the epithet would never be applied to an Afrikaaner who was
> granted US citizenship.  Would it even be applied to someone who ancestors
> migrated to African from the Indian subcontinent in the high days of the
> British Raj?  I suspect not.  I.e. African-American does not mean purely &
> simply 'an American citizen whose forebears come from Africa'.  The term
> seems to me to be restricted only to those who (a) live south of the
> Sahara, and (b) whose ancestors have been in Africa for at least the past
> four centuries.
I think that the term has become even more restrictive then that.  Unlike
the terms "Italian-American" or "Irish-American" which were applied to
recent immigrants, the term "African-American" was never applied to slaves,
the original immigrants from Africa.  African-American was a deliberate
coining by their descendants and has become singularly associated with those
descendants.  Africa is a huge continent.  Since the descendents of slaves
have no way of determining where on that huge continent their ancestors came
from (few of us can trace more than a few generations back, despite the
common knowledge that arose after the airing of "Roots), they had to adopt
the whole continent. Most recent African immigrants that I know refer to
themselves as Nigerian or Ethiopian or Kenyan or Egyptian.  I think the
historical circumstances and the deliberate choice of the term
African-American render it an inexact and more restrictive analogue of the
other hyphenated nationalities.

David

David E. Bell
The Gray Wizard
    dbell@graywizard.net
    www.graywizard.net

"Wisdom begins in wonder." - Socrates