Who Is An African-American?

By: W. Earle Simpson.

Each year black history is celebrated in the month of February. Everyday of this month is associated with the recall or admission of some great achievements by famous or notorious African Americans.
So far, in most of the Februaries of previous years, people have been mainly concerned with recalling the memorable deeds of African Americans, like Martin Luther King Jr., whose worthwhile contributions to society have made them significant.
This February, however, people may see the careful admission of an African American whose contribution to society might be taller than those before his.
Barack Obama, the Democratic Senator from Illinois, is the first African American with a serious chance of winning both the Democratic nomination as well as the presidency of the United States of America. Obama has so far won more than 50 percent of the Democratic primaries and caucuses, beating out his nearest and now only rival, Senator Hillary – Rodham Clinton by a margin wider than two to one.
Obama’s victories and ambitious hope have engaged the attention and participation of African Americans, if not America, like never before. For African Americans, their savior has arrived; their time has come! But just who is an African American?
According to the website, Answers.com, “The use of the taxonomic category African American, either in public or health or other disciplines, fundamentally reflects the historic and contemporary systems of racial stratification in American society.” But this nomenclature also resulted from the race’s self identification attempts. The online Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, suggests that the political consciousness resulting from the social ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s favored the terms ‘Blacks’ and ‘Afro-American’ above the derogatory ‘Negro’. However, in the 1980s the term ‘African American’, modeled on the term ‘German American’ was advanced and later made popular by the social and political activist the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
The term ‘African American’, Answers.com suggests, was believed to more accurately reflect historical lineage as well as “identity that is rooted in cultural and ethnogeographic origins.” Not only was this term posited to favorably represent racial identity, but its use by health and educational institutions suggests that it was also accepted as a means of racial and social stratification. Few African Americans stop to notice that, but that is not the only thing about this classification that has gone un-noticed:
If the term African American is to be accepted for what it’s worth, then people must agree that it includes every American of African decent. If this argument is accepted, and it should, then all American peoples of African decent must be understood to be and called African Americans.
According to the Heinz Family Philanthropies website, www.hfp.heinz.org, Senator John Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz-Kerry is a white African. She was born in Mozambique. Therefore Heinz-Kerry is an African American. And no doubt when she fills in her medical forms she includes that information. But the framers of the term never intended it to include people like her. They were thinking entirely of colored people of African decent.
If this term was not meant to include people like Heinz-Kerry under its classification, then it is a misnomer and suggests that maybe its framers still have work to do. So just who is an African American? The answer is yet to be posited.