THE TERM 'AFRICAN-AMERICAN' COMES INTO DISPUTE

Many Americans whose families have come to the U.S. from Africa face a bit of a contradiction when they are told that they cannot claim the term 'African-American' to describe their heritage. Recently, Alan Keyes (Republican candidate for Senate in Illinois) said that his Democratic opponent Barack Obama could not lay claim to the descriptor despite the fact that his father immigrated to this country from Kenya and his mother was born in Kansas. Keyes suggested that Obama does not have the same heritage as Keyes and other black Americans whose ancestors were slaves.

Apparently, this type of discrimination is occurring frequently as more immigrants arrive in the U.S. from African countries. According to the NYTimes, many immigrants are choosing to call themselves 'Nigerian-Americans' or 'Ethiopian-Americans' using their country of origin rather than using the general 'African-American'.

I can certainly understand the desire of black Americans who are descended from slaves to have a label that reflects their commonality, but I hardly agree that 'African-American' should be exclusive to them. Immigrants who come to this country, like the parents of Colin Powell who came from Jamaica, should certainly feel that they too are included in the community of black Americans. Why should they have to use a different label, singling themselves out as different? Perhaps it would be more helpful if the descendants of slaves found a more descriptive label that would encompass only themselves and still remain a part of the more universal 'African-American' designation as well. Perhaps something along the lines of 'Indentured-American' or 'Freed-African-American'.

The sad thing about all of this for me is that we have to be hyphenated Americans at all. Why can't we all just be Americans? I reject the label European-American for myself, although it is often fun to discuss my Irish-English-German-Dutch ancestry, because it is immaterial to who I am as a person--today. I understand the position that descendants of slaves take; however, if someone immigrated from Nigeria to Atlanta in 1945, did they not face the same discrimination as the descendents of slaves? Certainly they did, and probably worse because they had a funny accent in addition to their black skin. Should they not have the right to call themselves 'African-Americans' because they share some of the same heritage? Any black family that was in this country prior to 1965 faced the same discrimination as the ancestors of slaves, but their family might never have been owned--or they could have been owned in Jamaica, or Nigeria, or Ethiopia, just not in the U.S.

Black Americans whose families were owned by white Americans deserve to remember that and to designate themselves accordingly. I am just not convinced that the designator should be 'African-American'. To me, their argument is almost like saying that immigrants from Japan cannot use the designation 'Japanese-American' unless their families were here prior to 1941 and were part of the Japanese internment camps during WW2. Personally, as a white male, I never understood the problem with the term 'black American'--in fact, I even heard the daughter of Malcolm X, Atalla Shabazz, speak once at Virginia Tech saying that she chooses to call herself black because "black is beautiful."