Two items converged this week. First, a post at
Reddit referenced an incident that occurred in 2004, when a white, Johannesburg-born high-school student in Nebraska wanted to compete for the "
Highest-Achieving African American Student" award.
Records from 2002-2003 indicate only 56 of Westside’s 1,632 students were black, and some in this year’s student body were reportedly upset by Richards’ poster.
Ironically, the first two recipients of the student award were white. “It was not intended at the beginning to be one race only,” Clidie Cook, who helps organize the annual event, told the World-Herald. But Westside officials pushed to change that, feeling the spirit of the honor meant giving it to a black student, and by 2001, the ministerial alliance in charge specified it was for blacks only...
"Trevor is one of only maybe one or two other people that are actually from Africa. Trevor is more of an African-American than any other “African-American” at Westside. It is also wrong that there is an award for only black students when every other award at Westside is for everyone and everyone has an equal chance to receive those awards if they try."
The counterpoint comes from an Associated Press story published this week in the
Seattle Times (and elsewhere):
Today, many are resisting this progression by holding on to a name from the past: "black." For this group... "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...
"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."..
...at a 1988 gathering of civil-rights groups... 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,"...
Today, it's unclear what term is preferred... 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."
Some of my ancestors also arrived in this country about 150 years ago. I don't refer to myself as Norwegian-American or German-American, but perhaps since I have a mixed lineage I also have a different perspective.
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