Racial and cultural terms of reference are often ascribed to "people of colour" with the deliberate intention to demean or subjugate them. Desi K. Robinson takes a look at the struggle of African Americans to claim an identity of their own and to be defined by their own criteria.

In the 1990’s, the number of blacks with recent roots in sub-Saharan Africa nearly tripled while the number of blacks with origins in the Caribbean grew by more than 60 percent, according to demographers at the State University of New York at Albany. By 2000, foreign-born blacks made up 30 percent of the blacks in New York City, 28 percent of the blacks in Boston, Massachusetts, and about a quarter in Montgomery County, Maryland. Recently, black immigrants and their children have become more visible in universities, the workplace and in politics, with Colin L. Powell, the son of Jamaican immigrants, serving as Secretary of State in the United States, and Barack Obama, born to a Kenyan father and an American mother, a United States Senator from Illinois and emerging as a rising star in the Democratic Party.

There is an ongoing debate of who is African-American, how they are defined and who defines them, particularly since 1988, when the Reverend Jesse Jackson held a news conference to urge Americans to use the term African-American to refer to blacks. “Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base and African-Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity.”Teresa Heinz Kerry, who many would consider white, was born of Portuguese parents in Mozambique, has described herself as African American, without the hyphen.

The challenge is that there is no universal definition of a black person who lives in America or a person of any color who comes from Africa. Some residents’ lineage have made a segue through Central and South America as well as the Caribbean. Black-skinned people of every hue appear in every corner of the Earth. And though science may argue that innately they are of African descent, society, history, circumstances, power, or lack of it, have led people to define themselves culturally as well as racially. Black Americans who define themselves often reflect the life and cultural circumstances they’ve come to experience and endure. Two 85-year-old black women living in America may define themselves in totally different ways. One living in New York City with a history of southern segregation and poverty will clearly and adamantly define herself as black, not connecting
to African culture at all because of the negative connotations she endured in the racist south. The other, living in Oakland, California, also with a history of southern segregation and poverty, who learned from her mother the experience of the Jim Crow Laws, and vowed not to wear the degradation of being black in America, defines herself as African-American.

Shifting ethnic labels have long inspired fierce debates and discussions among blacks in America, reflecting changes in socio-economic circumstances, political strategies and evolving views of identity since Africans were first brought to America as slaves. Since the 1800s blacks in America have moved through myriad names and identifiers such as colored, mixed, black, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, nigger, Negro, people of color, Afro-American and African-American, including a host of pejorative slurs. These changes in identity have happened within a person’s lifetime.

Most blacks born and living in America do not have the luxury of a country of origin. Black people in America have the distinct burden of severed heritage. They remain people of African descent in a country that has offered contentious circumstances surrounding their rights. Even people of Asian, Middle Eastern, Hispanic, or European descent, who are reared in American culture and sometimes only speak English, have, at the least, a name that can lead them back to some region of origin. To be black and American, with most times, a surname of European descent, is to have a nebulous connection to Africa, a vast continent of 54 countries and 2,000 languages, a wide variety of it sign language and some of it even whistled to communicate.

Black Americans and blacks of immigrants living in America can clearly see some distinctions in their cultural differences. These differences are used sometimes to create deference as well as disrespect of the other. This dynamic is yet another special gift of racism. Black Americans have moved through a very contorted relationship with their ‘Africaness.’ The division of light-skinned and dark-skinned slaves, lights ‘privileged’ to be ‘house negroes’ and darks relegated to the heat of the southern plantations to be ‘field negroes,’ the allowance of light-skinned blacks to ‘pass’ in society as whites; black-face minstrel performances, mammie cookie jars, ‘darky and picanniny’ comics, paper bag parties where admission to the party was based on your closeness to the shade of a brown paper bag, jigaboos and wannabees; hair straighteners and skin lighteners. All of this has created polarized communities of black people causing many to reject anything remotely associated with Africa as well as anything that would be considered too white. The rejection of both led to confusion about a relationship with Africa as well as having the view that being educated and successful is selling out. Many blacks had and have to deal with the confusion of staying true to a culture that is as far away as it is diverse. While black Americans contend with the burden of firming up their identity and African heritage, they are also trying to make a way in a country that has historically told them it was not cool to be black, physically that is. Being relegated to the poorest resources that society had to offer was book-ended by instances of sometimes ruthless exploitation and outright theft of African-American artistic genius. When white performers developed their stage presence and personas, they often have turned to indigenously African-American performance styles. How is a black person to function at their fullest capacity when they are given several names to define themselves, are made to feel, as well as told they are less than their counterparts in society, yet their swagger and styles are emulated and mocked at the same time?

Does having a clearer distinction of one’s past offer stronger footing in the U.S? Perhaps. Black people are defined by the legal labels of the day that are assigned to them, the circumstances they use to define themselves, as well as the society at large who define them by the hodge-podge of images from television to the information superhighway.

James Brown, the pied piper of soul music, urged everyone to “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” in the 60s and in the 1950s, blacks struggled to go to school and receive a fair education. These movements, based on race, brought with it, victories. But now that the climate has changed, those victories are won and there isn’t the overt threat of racism, can black Americans afford the complacency of not having a movement? When you don’t continue to define yourself and maintain the fervor of the movement that helped define the ways society sees you, shifts in society will do that for you.

In 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court overturning its earlier ruling, declaring the establishment by state law of separate public schools for black and white students inherently unequal. This de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This victory paved the way for integration and the Civil Rights Movement.  On June 29, 2007, this ruling was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, stating that schools can not be integrated based on race. Supreme Court Justice Kennedy stated that “the enduring hope is that race should not matter; the reality is that too often it does.”

Earl Caldwell, founding director of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and nationally-renowned journalist, said in an interview with Rice N Peas, in reaction to the case, “It’s a matter of race. America divides on the basis of white and black.” Caldwell was the lone reporter to witness the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in April of 1968 and as a New York Times reporter, he went coast to coast to cover the riots that swept black America in the summers of 1967 and 1968. “I hope that the overturning of this case is a wake-up call in America. The schools that black children learn in have no sense of mission and no sense of purpose and are not environments of learning. There needs to be school environments that have discipline, curriculum that will excite kids, and teachers that believe that all kids can learn. Creating these schools speaks to the historical wrongs of slavery and the issue of reparations. What does the country owe for slavery? How do you pay a debt? You either pay the debt or there are consequences.”

Sometimes registries, the census or dictionaries don’t have to define who African Americans are because events and movements often create greater images than the pages of a dictionary. What definitions do we create for ourselves and each other when we see girls slathered in baby oil lying across the lap of the latest rap artist, or black and white television news clips of protesters fighting for the right to vote or to be properly educated being flayed with fire hoses, or families sitting on rooftops asking desperately to be rescued from the hurricane that washed away their lives? No one thing can define a person or group of people and anyone would argue that they would want their lives to be defined by their best day; but a startling impression (or court decision) can sometimes outweigh the presence of a person standing right before you. It is important to remember that in this age of information where it is created and disseminated at rapid speed, that media images, jokes, entertainment, flags and even legislation change, can shape the ways in which blacks in every country are defined.

1st July 2007