twoshots wrote:
Kajjie wrote:
Kara_h wrote:
Kajjie wrote:
As people are talking about racism on here, people in the UK find it very odd that people in the US talk about "African Americans". It confuses some people if the person they are referring to isn't from Africa.
Remember, our history on the topic is a bit different: we had a slave trade that only ended in a civil war. Race riots. Why do you think Obama being elected was such a big deal here?
We think Obama being president is a pretty big deal over here as well.

I don't think the civil war and race riots fully expains why you call them 'African Americans'. It offers
some explanation, as the slaves were African.

The term African American is fairly recent (about 30 years ago) and was began by the African American community itself. Perhaps to some extent this has to do with the idea of trying to ground themselves in the traditions of Africa which seems to have become quite popular maybe a few decades before that, although the term can be seen as simply an analog to other ethnic identifiers used commonly in the United States (e.g., Irish American, German American, Italian American, &c).
Wikipedia has a brief and completely unsourced discussion of the term. Quote:
mitharatowen - Personally, I don't like it when people call me Caucasian. It's such a weird term, in my opinion. I mean the equivilants for other races are 'Afro-Caribbean' and 'Asian' and stuff, which makes sense as it's where they come from (Afro-Caribbean = descended from people from Africa or the Caribbean), but Caucasian? Since when are we all from Caucasia? Who even says Caucasia, or knows where it is?
Again, with Wikipedia as my guide, it seems that this term originated in the 1800s and seems to have originated with the racial classification of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach who wrote
Blumenbach wrote:
Caucasian variety - I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones (birth place) of mankind.
The fact that we still use a term originating with that kind of reason boggles the imagination.
There's one theory that the American expression 'Caucasian' relates to a belief that after the
Great Flood,the main white race that survived did so because they lived high above sea level in the Caucasus mountains.From there emerged what became Aryans,Sumerians,Phoenicians
and others who eventually spread around the world via the colonial European empires.
Likewise,Africa was where the main black race came from.In fact,there's another theory
that the Earth was once on an orbit nearer to the sun and so everyone at that time probably
had black skin which was best suited to deal with the sun's heat.It could be that President
Obama actually represents the world returning to it's original African origins.
_________________
I have lost the will to be apathetic