African Americans descend primarily from enslaved
Africans brought to the
United States, especially the
American South, between 1565 and 1807, the majority of whom were brought in the 18th century. About three-quarters of the slaves came from
West Africa and the remaining quarter came from the Angola-Congo region.
[1] Some estimate that the average African American is 80% African-descended, 40% of African Americans also have some
Native American ancestry.
[2][3]
Previously acceptable terms that are now viewed as archaic (and, outside of historical contexts, even insulting) include
***** and
Colored; today, the most common term is probably
African American, with
Black also commonly accepted since the late 1960s; the term
Afro-American was apparently first prominently used in 1961 by a group of activists including
Maya Angelou and
Leroi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka)
[4] and became common from the late 1960s into the 1980s; it remains generally acceptable, but less common, and has lately been developing a "period" connotation. Blacks are also included in the broader term "
people of color".
The history of the use of these terms is evident in the names of various African American organizations founded over time. The civil rights organization the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded 1909, is significantly older than the philanthropic organization the
United ***** College Fund, founded in 1944. The term
colored had come to be seen as politically incorrect by the time of the UNCF's founding. Nonetheless, both
***** and
colored remained common until the late 1960s, especially in the
Southern United States.
As the
Civil Rights Movement evolved in the 1960s into the
Black Power/Black Pride movement, these older terms lost favor and became associated with the pre-civil-rights situation of Blacks in America. Through this movement, the terms
Black and
Afro-American both emerged into common usage in the late 1960s. Due to this legacy, by 1980, the term
Black had become accepted by a majority of Americans of African descent, and had also became the referential term applied by
white Americans in general.
In the late
1980s, Blacks began to abandon the term
Afro-American, adopting the
autonym African American instead. Some did so out of a desire for an unabbreviated expression of their African heritage that could not be mistaken or derided as an allusion to the
afro hairstyle. Others wished to assert their pride in their African origins. The term dated back at least to
Black nationalist Malcolm X, who favored African American as more historically and culturally defining over other terms, and used it at an OAAU (Organization of Afro American Unity) meeting in the mid-1960s, saying, "Twenty-two million African Americans - that's what we are - Africans who are in America." However, it did not become widely used at that time. During the 1980s, the most influential proponent of the widespread adoption of the term was
Jesse Jackson. Jackson and like-minded persons argued that
African American was more in keeping with the United States tradition of "
hyphenated Americans", which links people with their ancestors' geographic points of origin, and allows people to assert pride in their ethnic heritage, while maintaining an American national identity.
This usage of the term African American generally refers to black African ancestry and American nationality. But generally speaking, the term does not include whites or Asians from Africa, nor does it include Africans in Africa, the Caribbean, or elsewhere. Still, there is disagreement as to whether the term should refer only to Blacks who can trace their American roots to the colonial period or slavery, or whether it also should include black immigrants from
Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America and their descendants. To some extent, this is a matter of
cultural vs.
geographic meaning. In the narrow sense, the term refers only to those descended from a small number of colonial
indentured servants and the estimated 500,000 Africans taken to
British North America (later becoming the United States) as slaves (of approximately 10 - 12 million Africans taken to the
Western Hemisphere in general). In a broader usage, the term can include
West Indian and
Afro-Latino immigrants whose African ancestors also survived the
Middle Passage or recent
African immigrants/children of immigrants with American citizenship, but these groups tend to use the ethnic terms
Latino or
Hispanic, or identify themselves by their countries of origin, (for example, as
Nigerian,
Dominican or
Jamaican), instead of African American. The term does not include predominantly
European,
Arab or
South Asian-descended immigrants from the African continent, and they are not generally considered to be indigenous Africans by the black African majority.
However, under certain circumstances these groups that have existed in the Central American and Caribbean region since the 1600s will be called black by people from these diverse regions. There is a multitude of Asian descendants from the 1600s in the Caribbean and Central Americas.
This mixing of culture and "race" has lead to mostly "dark" skinned peoples of this region referred to as "black" or African American, but neither is a term these people claim as a part of their identity.
Non-blacks from Africa who become permanent residents or citizens of the United States are not generally referred to as African American nor are they thought of as such in the United States. Ironically, many Africans throughout the "motherland" identify with their "blackness", even in iteration within their common native tongue to define their racial makeup.
The
Associated Press stylebook prefers the term black. It instructs journalists to use African-American only in quotations or in the names of organizations or if individuals describe themselves as such.
The end of blackness
