You may remember that after meeting with the sisters Diamond and Silk, Donald Trump reported the revelation that amongst themselves, blacks never refer to themselves as African American.
Well, it turns out that a liberal-leaning African-American — I mean a liberal-leaning black man — is in total agreement and the linguist writes as much in the New York Times. Declaring that It’s Time to Let Go of ‘African American’, John McWhorter goes on to ask "Why not just say what we mean?"
The problem [with African American] is that the term appeared on [Zohran Mamdani's college] application, or anywhere else. Plenty of Black people have never liked it, and ever more are joining the ranks. It’s time to let it go.
“African American” entered mainstream circulation in the late ’80s as a way to call attention to Black people’s heritage in the same way that terms like “Italian American” and “Asian American” do for members of those groups. The Rev. Jesse Jackson encouraged its usage, declaring: “Black does not describe our situation. In my household there are seven people and none of us have the same complexion. We are of African American heritage.” In 1989 the columnist and historian Roger Wilkins told Isabel Wilkerson: “Whenever I go to Africa, I feel like a person with a legitimate place to stand on this earth. This is the name for all the feelings I’ve had all these years.”
Since that time, the United States has seen an enormous change in immigration patterns. In 1980 there were about 200,000 people in America who were born in Africa; by 2023 there were 2.8 million. So today, for people who were born in Africa, any children they have after moving here and Black people whose last African ancestors lived centuries ago, the term “African American” treats them as if they are all in the same category, forcing a single designation for an inconveniently disparate range of humans.
Further complicating matters is that many Africans now living here are not Black. White people from, for example, South Africa or Tanzania might also legitimately call themselves African American.
… A term that is meant to be descriptive but that can refer to Cedric the Entertainer, Trevor Noah, Elon Musk and Zohran Mamdani is a little silly.
And not just silly but chilly. “African American” sounds like something on a form. Or something vaguely euphemistic, as if you’re trying to avoid saying something out loud. It feels less like a term for the vibrant, nuanced bustle of being a human than like seven chalky syllables bureaucratically impervious to abbreviation. Italian Americans call themselves “Italian” for short. Asian Americans are “Asian.” But for any number of reasons, it’s hard to imagine a great many Black Americans opting to call themselves simply African.
To the extent that “African American” was designed to change perceptions of what “Black” means, it hasn’t worked. The grand old euphemism treadmill has done it in. Again and again we create new terms hoping to get past negative associations with the old ones, such as “homeless” for “bum.” But after a while the negative associations settle like a cloud of gnats on the new terms as well, and then it’s time to find a further euphemism.
… But all along we’ve had a perfectly good word to describe Black people: Black. We should just use that.
Black power! Yeah. But African American power?
… “Black is beautiful.” Yes. Truly, “African American” isn’t.
While David Brooks explains Why I Am Not a Liberal, while Bret Stephens shares his insights into Mass Migration and Liberalism’s Fall, and while an Obama speechwriter wonders whether it isn't time to stop snubbing your right-wing family — leading one to wonder whether the New York Times is getting a modicum of common sense — John McWhorter's article, It’s Time to Let Go of ‘African American’, leads to the associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University being invited to a debate with David Leonhardt (pJillian Weinberger) regarding "the politics of how we talk about race and identity and discuss whether “Latinx” is a thing."
David Leonhardt: … Can you summarize for me the background and the history of the debate between African American and Black?
John McWhorter: … In 1988, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson had a massive influence on the Black community, he basically declared that we need to start calling ourselves African Americans rather than Black, because Black was too crude and general to capture all the different shades that we are.
And I think the idea also was that to add the African part was to give a note of pride, a note of heritage. And so it happened very quickly. If you were alive and mature at the time, it was as if all of a sudden one week you were supposed to say African American rather than Black.
I never much liked it. I didn’t rail against it, but it never felt right to me because I’m Black. I’m a Black American, but to me the African connection is too long ago. It’s too abstract. It didn’t feel right. Italian American is one thing. Your mother, your grandmother speaks Sicilian, and you’re eating Italian food and you have a certain way of talking. There’s a whole culture.
Black American culture is not African in that way. It’s Black American. But time has gone by and the problem is that the term “African American” has become so awkward that it was time to start asking some questions. Because back in 1988, there weren’t nearly as many immigrants from Africa in the United States as now. That number has truly skyrocketed.
And so it’s at the point where — well, what about the African Americans who are like Italian Americans, where Africa is just a generation or two away? You speak one of the languages or you halfway speak it. In other words, you are [truly] an African American person. Is that person really the same thing as Eddie Murphy or me? And it was time to start asking some questions.
… Leonhardt: Well, if we’re going to talk about uncomfortable linguistic subjects, we have to talk about Latinx, which has had a little boomlet of becoming a symbol of how parts of the progressive left, particularly the academic elite progressive left, have become out of touch with parts of America. …
So how did we end up with the phrase “Latinx,” John? And how do you think about it?
McWhorter: That is a very 2010s thing. I remember first hearing it at Columbia from students around 2014. And I thought, OK, it’s clever. It avoids the gender binary.
But the simple truth is it’s been a long time now, and very few actual Latinos are ever going to embrace the term. Partly because X is awkward. It’s not very aesthetically pleasing given that Spanish words so often end in vowels, which the human ear likes. Then, more to the point, there are an awful lot of Latinos who don’t want to get rid of the gender binary. That is, however you feel about it, generally a minority opinion among human beings.
That means that it’s highly imposed, but I’m not angry about “Latinx” the way many people are because I live in a very Latino neighborhood in New York and I hear Spanish daily. I have never heard a single person ever use it.
… Leonhardt: … Democrats thought if we enact a more and more and more open border policy, as Joe Biden did, we will win more Latino support. In fact, the opposite happened because when you look at actual public opinion, Latinos have views on immigration, much as they have views on “Latinx,” that look much more like American society as a whole, and not like the views of academics that you are hanging out with presumably, John, at faculty meetings.
McWhorter: [laughs] One of the hardest things for humanities and social science academics is that they are often under an understandable and sincere impression that their views on matters like on what Latinos should be called, on immigration, on frankly any social issue, are truth rather than an opinion.
… Leonhardt: And maybe to be a little bit mischievous, I would say the last item on the McWhorter doctrine is don’t confuse arguments that you hear coming from academia with views that are widely held among the American public. Maybe they are, but there’s a good chance that they are not.
McWhorter: [laughs] That makes me sound so disloyal to what I think of as my tribe, but I’d have to come clean and say yes.
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