Some blacks insist: 'I’m not African-American'

[Thuso]

Denying my African heritage erases my identity. Black is only a color. A black American is an orphan who insists on staying lost. That is how I feel about this issue.

It is amazing to me how thoroughly our sojourn through slavery has confused so many "Africans in America." I like that term, coined by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk. It doesn't matter that we were brought here as slaves, our freedom sets us free to seek our true identity. However, so many of us demand to be voluntarily assimilated into something called "Black." And so we sink into a debate among ourselves about what we should be called.

It reminds me of the Biblical Exodus when many of the Israelites complained that life was better back in Egypt where they were enslaved, rather than endure the journey through the wilderness to the promised land.

We have no promised land, but we have a foundational heritage -- and it is in Africa. I learned living in southern Africa that our heritage extends through all of sub-Saharan African. We are all cousins from a common ethnic root. Separation from that heritage dooms us to wander as a lost people.

The article below shares some of the current thinking.

The labels used to describe Americans of African descent mark the movement of a people from the slave house to the White House. Today, many are resisting this progression by holding on to a name from the past: “black.”

For this group — some descended from U.S. slaves, some immigrants with a separate history — “African-American” is not the sign of progress hailed when the term was popularized in the late 1980s. Instead, it’s a misleading connection to a distant culture.

The debate has waxed and waned since African-American went mainstream, and gained new significance after the son of a black Kenyan and a white American moved into the White House. President Barack Obama’s identity has been contested from all sides, renewing questions that have followed millions of darker Americans:

What are you? Where are you from? And how do you fit into this country?


Read more: http://www.heraldnews.com/news/x1975...#ixzz1lUMizpGu