Afro_Blue: [b]Update, story on the Oreo (sellout) that wants to diminish his African roots.
Gibre George started a Facebook page called 'Don't Call Me African-American."
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/02/21/v-print/2653580/facebook-page-challenges-how-blacks.html#storylink=cpy
Facebook page challenges how blacks define themselves
By AUDRA D.S. BURCH
In the quiet of his Miami home late one night, Gibré George yielded to something that had been bothering him for almost as long as he has lived in South Florida.
So he sat before his laptop and typed the words that he felt: Don’t Call Me African-American.
The Facebook page with the provocative sentiment summed up a moment of racial and ethnic clarity for George and, perhaps, a shifting consciousness for others. For more than a year, the page sat idle — among countless other Internet identity declarations — liked, disliked and commented on mostly by a circle of friends. Then, almost as quickly as you can point and click, the page burst onto the larger social media radar, offering an open, instant public forum to discuss how people of color define themselves in an America more diverse than ever before.
“I was just trying to express my personal feelings. I prefer to be called American, but if you must further define me, then use the term black or person of color. The term African American just doesn’t settle right in my stomach because it’s not accurate,” said George, 38, a party promoter who holds regular events in Hollywood and Miami Beach (For Oyibos)[/b] . “I am not in anyway disavowing my African heritage, but if you are going to call me African American, then call white people Euro-Americans. That would make the playing field even.”
In creating the page, admittedly on a whim, George — who also has Caribbean roots — stepped squarely into the national discourse of how and what Americans of African descent should be labeled, a debate that has raged from the earliest days of race classifications when America lived in black and white. George and his page appeared in an Associated Press article earlier this month distributed nationally, fueling the discussion on websites, blogs and radio. Before long, the BBC was calling for an interview about the usage of the African American versus black. Along the way, the page generated almost 2,200 likes and an online conversation that took on a life of its own.
‘PIVOTAL MOMENT’
“We are at this pivotal moment where some people believe we are losing the complexity and the diversity of the African diaspora by calling ourselves African American, that it is not a broad enough term to include the range of blacks living in America,” said James Peterson, director of Africana Studies and associate professor of English at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. “This conversation is.gathering steam now and is a by-product of diversity.”
In South Florida, a mosaic of ethnicities, the Black Affairs Advisory Board had been discussing whether to change its name a few years ago. The group is planning to sponsor a workshop this year to explore cultural differences within the African diaspora.
“We were trying to find a way to be more inclusive because we have so many blacks here who are from different countries,” director Retha Boone-Frye said. “The term we developed was Black World Community, which does a better job of covering people from here or Jamaica or Bahamas or Haiti or Nigeria.”
Peterson said the term African Americans, popularized a quarter-century ago, pertains to blacks in the United States whose lineage is tied to American slavery, considered the historical starting point of the group. But to some like George, that description does not adequately cover immigrants or Caribbean blacks living in the U.S. whose narrative, culture and path is different, even though many also descended from slaves. The term was created as an upper-case nod to both the new and former homelands, similar to Irish-American or Italian-American.
AN ALTERNATIVE
It was also an alternative to the term black, which had grown out of the pride of the Civil Rights Movement and, later, the Black Power movement but then took on a host of negative connotations within popular culture.
“Black was an early classification centuries ago — and seen as derogatory — that whites used to describe people of color. People later fought to have the term colored used and when that got bad, they didn’t use it anymore. The black power movement in many ways reclaimed the term black and it became powerful, and then it also became negative,” said Anne H. Charity Hudley, associate professor of education, English and linguistics and Africana studies at The College of William & Mary. “Then came African American, a term that was supposed to encompass the diaspora. The social message was we are all together and that is where our strength comes from. But some want to be identified closer to their origin, which is where you see the tension.”
The issue of self-identification came into focus again when the nation elected its first black president, the son of parents from Kenya and Kansas, and a steady stream of black immigrants continues to drive the issue.
‘LARGER ISSUE’
“The larger issue is that over the years, people of the African diaspora lost the right to name themselves,’’ said Charity Hudley, co-author of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics. “It’s not really about what is right or wrong but how people see and think of themselves, which is a personal choice.’’
That may resonate particularly in South Florida, where immigrants from Jamaica, Haiti, the Bahamas and other nations make up one of the nation’s largest concentration of Caribbean immigrants.
To George, the term African American, however noble in its creation, dismisses his father and the half of his family tree that comes from St. Lucia. He grew up in New York in a home dominated by the West Indian culture. Because of his brown complexion, he was often referred to as African American. It wasn’t until he moved to South Florida in the early 1990s, where people often define themselves by nationality, that he began to think about how he identified himself.
“Every one of us has to deal with how we define ourselves. When I was thinking about that, I thought American first. And while I understand the terms that are used to refer to us, I think they are outdated,” he said. “Black or person of color is a modern reflection of who we are.”
[/b] The fact that hes from the caribbean is funny. |
phreakabit:
THANK GOODNESS!!!!! Why go for Black? I thought NIGGER would have fitted seamlessly. Just in case you haven't noticed, these black americans are the ones giving "Africans (in reference to dark skinned people in general)" a bad name.
They are naturally LAZY ! Laziness is embedded in their DNA
Dirty!
Mannerless!
And would rather die than read a book.
All they ever do is sit at home, wait for the welfare cheques, eat fried chicken, drink Kool-Aid, watch some hip-hop video / p0rn, come up with some silly dance routine, play video games, talk about girls of different races and which one has the biggest azz, pick up their gun - which btw is a must have for every NIGGER, go out and shoot someone A "black" man preferably, return home sleep. . . . . and then repeat the cycle the next day. Little reason they are the poorest race in the USA today, despite the endless opportunities available there. Yes the job opportunities are not as much as it used to be, but tell me how are the Latinos, Asians, Indians and Pakistanis finding/getting jobs.
To be fair, Africa, especially Sub Saharan Africa is the laughing stock of the earth and has been for at least a hundred years. Whenever someone wants to claim black people can't run a country they use African nations as an example. |
