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It is important to note that use of the term African American carries important political overtones. Previous terms used to identify American blacks were conferred upon the group by whites and were included in the wording of various laws and legal decisions which became tools of white supremacy and oppression. There developed among blacks in America a growing desire for a term of their own choosing.
With the political consciousness that emerged from the political and social ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Negro fell into disfavor among many American blacks. It had taken on a moderate, accommodationist, even Uncle Tomish, connotation. The period was a time when growing numbers of blacks in the U.S., particularly black youth, celebrated their blackness and their historical and cultural ties with the African continent. They defiantly embraced black as a group identifier, a term often associated in English with things negative and undesirable -- a term they themselves had repudiated only two decades earlier -- proclaiming, "Black is beautiful."
By the 1990s, the terms Afro-American and African-American began to reemerge, this time for many as self-referential terms of choice. Just as other ethnic groups in American society historically had adopted names descriptive of their families' geographical points of origin (such as Italian-American, Irish-American, Polish-American), many blacks in America expressed a preference for a similar term. Because of the historical circumstances surrounding the capture, enslavement and systematic attempts to de-Africanize blacks in the U.S. under chattel slavery, most American blacks are unable to trace their ancestry to a specific African nation; hence, the entire continent serves as a geographic marker.
For many, African-American is more than a name expressive of cultural and historical roots. The term expresses black pride and a sense of kinship and solidarity with others of the black African diaspora -- an embracing of the notion of pan-Africanism earlier enunciated by prominent black thinkers such as Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Dubois and, later, George Padmore.
A discussion of the term African-American and related terms can be found in the journal article "The Politicization of Changing Terms of Self Reference Among American Slave Descendants" in American Speech v 66 is 2 Summer 1991 p. 133-46.
To be considered African-American in the United States of America, not even half of one's ancestry must be black. But will one quarter do, or one-eighth, or less? The nation's answer to the question "Who is black?" long has been that a black is any person with any known African black ancestry. This definition reflects the long experience with racism; white supremacy; slavery; and, later, with Jim Crow laws.
In the southern United States, it became known as the one-drop rule, meaning that a single drop of "black blood" makes a person black. Some courts have called it the traceable amount rule, and anthropologists call it the hypo-descent rule, meaning that racially mixed persons are assigned the status of the subordinate group. This definition emerged from the American South to become America's national definition, generally accepted by whites and blacks -- but for different reasons. White supremacists, whose motivation was racist, considered anyone with black ancestry tainted,inherently inferior morally and intellectually and, thus, subordinate. Blacks, on the other hand, generally shared a common lot in society and, therefore, common cause -- regardless of their ethnic mixture.
The United States Supreme Court formalized the legal status of this rule in Plessy v. Ferguson ( 1896), where the Court affirmed the legality of racial segregation and upheld the state of Louisiana's ruling that, despite being 7/8ths white, Homer Plessy's one black great-grandparent rendered him legally black and, therefore, subject to being barred from whites-only railway carriages.
In the last decade, a growing movement has developed, spearheaded mostly by white mothers of African-American children, towards the adoption and acceptance of the term bi-racial. Some bi-racial blacks also refer to themselves as mixed, when, in fact, virtually all African-Americans are mixed. In the mid 1970s, New York's New Amsterdam News reported that African-Americans with Native American ancestry numbered in the upper 80th percentile. Native Americans often took in runaway bondsmen and women and accepted them as members of their tribes, and there is a lengthy history of peaceful coexistence and fighting alliances against whites between Native Americans and African-Americans. Some Native American tribes, notably, the Cherokee, held African-American slaves. Further, recent genetic tests on a small population of African-Americans revealed their ancestry to be, on average, approximately 19 percent white.
Additionally, throughout U.S. history, very fair persons with straight hair sometimes chose to " pass" as white to escape racism and discrimination, oftentimes completely separating themselves from contact with darker members of their family. This was a dangerous action, in light of anti- miscegenation laws, social attitudes and lynch mobs. Many lived in constant fear of producing children with telltale African features or being otherwise discovered.
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