Why “African American” IS the Most Accurate Term

By Guest Contributor invisiman52, originally published at Max Protect

(An African Methodist Episcopal Church and stop on the Underground Railroad)

On his blog at The New Republic,  John McWhorter argues that “African American” does not accurately describe the descendants of African slaves who live in the United States today.  He suggests that the term should be reserved for “actual Africans” who emigrate to the United States; but for those whose ancestors were brought to the North American mainland in chains, “black will have to do,” McWhorter says.  There are several reasons why his logic in the post (as well as that in this Bloggingheads with Glenn Loury) is flawed.  If one takes the time to understand the historical, geopolitical, and ethical ramifications of the term “African American,” he might realize that it is the most precise signifier for the people whose ancestors endured the traumatic encounter with European enslavers in the North American colonies and United States.

First off, it bears noting that if someone has a personal aversion to the term “African American” there is no need to try to convince her otherwise.  (Indeed, people do not like the names a parent gives them and change them as a result.)  Yet McWhorter’s argument does not rest on personal predilection, but rather it is an attempt to reason and eventually settle on the most exact designation for black people native-born to the U.S.  As such, the first concern is one of history.  (And McWhorter recognizes this, as his title suggests: “Did ‘African American’ History Really Happen in Atlanta, Cleveland, Philly, and Detroit?  Listening to the Census.”)  That most black Americans have not been to Africa, do not speak an indigenous African language, and/or cannot trace their ancestral line to a particular tribe or region is beside the point.  The “African” in African American is not that grounded; it is does not signify the particularities of Africa.  Instead, the “African” in African America refers to a very distinct historical process of acculturation, trauma, and community building.  As historian Ira Berlin puts in his definitive text on slavery, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America:

When the captives boarded ship in Africa, they did not think of themselves as Africans.  Their allegiance was to a family, clan, community, or perhaps–although rarely–state, but never to the continent itself.  By the time they reached the American shores, that had begun to change; as they disembarked, the process by which many African nations became one had already gained velocity.  The construction of an African identity proceeded on the western, not the eastern, side of the Atlantic, amid the maelstrom of the plantation generation. (104)

It is this historical activity that “African”  connotes.  That these people and their descendants would eventually lose the distinctiveness of their native clans, and instead merge strategies of survival and elements of culture means that only a term as capacious and ambiguous as “African” can forcefully capture them.  Paradoxically, the “African” in African American has everything and nothing to do with the places of Africa.

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