An African-American is an American predominantly descended from black Africans. Over the years, the term has supplanted, in succession, the equivalent terms, "colored," "negro," and "Negro," and commonly is used interchangeably with "black."
Virtually all persons who refer to themselves as African-Americans are descendants of persons brought to the Americas as slaves or indentured servants between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
Those whose ancestors were brought as slaves to the Caribbean, or to Latin America, but have come to the United States as free people, are sometimes called African-American, but they seldom use the term self-referentially. The general rule regarding ethnic appellations in the U.S. is the more specific, the better. Just like other immigrants to the United States, these black immigrants more commonly are referred to by their nations of origin. If they are from the English- or French-speaking Caribbean, they are Jamaican-American, Haitian-American, etc., or, simply, Caribbean-American. The same rule applies to African immigrants.
The one exception to this general rule is blacks who immigrate to the U.S. from Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking nations in Central and South America. They are "Hispanic," and most often refer to themselves as Latino, and, increasingly, Afro-Latino.
Because indigenous Africans are black, and only black Africans were chattel slaves in the U.S., the term "African-American" is not properly to used to refer to non-black Africans, such as Asiatic- or Euro-Semitic peoples from northern Africa, or white settlers or immigrants to the African continent and their descendants. Some Afro-Semitic peoples who immigrate to the U.S., however, are referred to as blacks. And, like other blacks, they sometimes are referred to as "African-American."
Through the 1950s, most considered "black" a derogatory term, but it became popular a decade later during the Black Pride or Black Consciousness movement of the mid to late 1960s, following close on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement. It remains a common term in the United States to describe all people of indigenous African descent and is often used interchangeably with "African-Amercan."
Origins
While the term had been used in print in some circles at least since the 1920s (and often shortened to Afro-American, the name of a famous Baltimore newspaper founded in 1892), it came to much wider use in the United States since the 1970s as the preferred term, as requested by some black Americans themselves. As of 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau identifies 12.9% of the US population as black or African-American.
Political Overtones
It is important to note that use of this term carries important political overtones. Previous terms used to identify black Americans 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 Tommish, 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 (e.g., Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans), 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" was more than a name expressive of cultural and historical roots. The term expressed a growing sense of 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.
Who is African-American?
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?" has long been that a black is any person with any known African black ancestry. This definition reflects the long experience with 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. The United States Supreme Court formalized the legal status of this rule in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), where the court upheld the legal segregation of blacks and whites into separate facilities, 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 and others refer to themselves as "mixed," when, in fact, virtually all African-Americans, or "blacks," are mixed. In the late 1970s, New York's New Amsterdam News reported that African-Americans with Native American ancestry numbered in the upper 80th percentile.
Additionally, throughout U.S. history, very fair persons with straight hair sometimes chose to pass as white and joined the white community 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. Recent genetic tests have found that those who classify themselves African-Americans are today on average 19% white.
Terms no longer in common use
The term Negro, which was widely used until the 1960s, is today generally considered inappropriate and derogatory. Once widely considered acceptable, it became associated with Uncle Tomism and fell into disfavor during the black pride movement of the 1960s. The self-referential term of preference for "Negroes" became "black". Another objection to the term is that it too easily could be misprounced unintentionally or by design to sound like "nigra", a redneck word closely related to nigger, a much-detested slur.
"Negroid" is an anthropological term related to "Negro", once in common use to describe indigenous Africans and their descendants throughout the African diaspora. As with most descriptors of race based on outmoded phenotypical standards, however, the term is often meaningless in various contexts and, though still in use, has fallen into disfavor.
Other largely defunct, seldom used terms to define African-American are "mulatto" and "colored." The term "mulatto" originally was used to mean the offspring of a "pure African black" and a "pure European white." The Latin root of the word is "mulo," or, "mule," inferring incorrectly that, like mules, which are horse-donkey hybrids, mulattoes are sterile. For example, in the early twentieth century, African-American leaders such as Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass, who had slaves as mothers and white fathers, were referred to as mulattoes.
The term "quadroon" referred to a person who is one-fourth African in descent, perhaps someone born to a Caucasian mother and a mulatto father. Someone of one-eighth African descent was an "octoroon," although the term often was used to refer to anyone white person with even a hint of black ancestry.
The term "colored" seemed for a time to refer to only mulattoes, especially lighter ones, but later it became a euphemism for all blacks. With widespread racial mixture, "black" or "negro" came to mean any slave or descendant of a slave, no matter how much mixed. Eventually in the U.S, the terms "mulatto", "colored", "negro", "Negro," "black", and "African-American" all came to mean people with any known black African ancestry.
The descriptive term Black American has never been common in the US: Black American and white American are used only when the writer or speaker feels the need to emphasize both race and that they are speaking specifically of Americans.
Slavery and oppression
People of sub-Saharan Africa, often kidnapped and sold into slavery by Arabs and other black Africans (sometimes as a result of inter-tribal warfare), were brought to the United States involuntarily by slave traders from many European nations as well as the United States from 1619 through 1806, when the trade was declared illegal. After the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War, African Americans continued to be denied fully equal civil rights in many jurisdictions. This happened both legally and through extra-legal practices, including, in the most extreme form lynchings and terrorism by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Many legal barriers to equality were removed as a result of the work of the Civil Rights Movement during the years between the end of World War II and the end of the 1960s (see Lyndon B. Johnson); however, de facto discrimination still persists, and racially motivated lynchings and other less violent hate crimes, though isolated, still occur.