African Americans

Historically, African Americans have been studied and explained as compared with the values and characteristics of Europeans. The term African American is an Afrocentric word adopted as a label for people who live in the United States and are descendants of slaves and who share the legacy of bondage, segregation, and legal discrimination. Their ancestors came from sub-Saharan Africa. The Afrocentric view holds that African Americans (people of African descent, African people) and their interests must be viewed as actors and agents in human history, rather than as marginal to the European historical experience.

The second Africans in North America (1528) came as indentured servants or as part of a ship's crew; the second wave of immigrants were captured in Africa and sold into bondage for the slave trade in the United States. Some of these individuals lived as free men and women, and others earned their freedom. By 1600, most African Americans were forced to come to this country as slaves on ships and under the most extreme and horrid conditions; many perished in the journey. The forced migration of people from sub-Saharan Africa occurred as a result of the growth of the tobacco and cotton industries and a need for a free and renewable labor force. Africa became a major source of the labor force that made the United States prosperous. Slavery remained legal for 200 years. About 500,000 Africans were forced into slavery in the United States; legalized slave trading was abolished in 1808.

Before the 19th century, other terms were commonly used to refer to African Americans, including words such as “colored,” “Negro,” and “black.” The term “colored” was used during the 1800s as a means of including individuals who were the product of miscegenation (children who were born of parents who were either of European/white, American/Native American or a combination of both, and African/black). Other terms were used simultaneously during the 1890 census (e.g., black, mulatto, quadroon and octoroon, depending upon the degree of white blood in their ancestry).

The political correctness of what to call African descendants changed again during the 20th century. As a result of the Civil Rights movement of the 1970s, African Americans demanded that they be referred to as “Negro” versus “colored.” During the 1970s, the Black Power movement brought about the term “black” as the appropriate reference term, followed by the term African American in the 1990s. Forms used during the 2000 Census allowed citizens to self-identify as African American/black, making the terms interchangeable. By 2003, almost half of blacks preferred to be called African American.

The label African American remains a controversial and ambiguous term for several reasons. First, not all people of African descent were descendants of slaves born in the United States. Changes in the federal immigration law in the 1960s resulted in an influx of people from sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. These people were descendants of Africans but were not born in the United States and did not share the legacy of slavery. Their presence caused a major demographic shift in the African American population. During the 1990s, the numbers of immigrants to the United States from Africa nearly tripled; the number from the Caribbean grew by more than 60%. The number of foreign-born people of African descent was estimated to be 2.0 million in 1999, and this number represents 8% of the foreign-born population in the United States. Additionally, individuals of African descent who continue to reside in their native countries (Caribbean, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, South America, and Canada) are also African Americans because of their ancestors and the fact that they reside in the Americas; none of these individuals considers himself or herself as African American, nor do governmental officials. For instance, individuals of mixed ethnicities of African and Hispanic descent are labeled on census forms as Hispanic. Others are separated as being black of Hispanic origin. Another example is people from Haiti who consider themselves Haitian, not African Americans. These individuals are classified as African American/black, resulting in a 14% (more than 4.4 million) increase in the population of African Americans, whereas the total U.S. population grew by only 10%.

...