What’s in a Name? : <i> African-American</i> Is the Accurate Ethnic Label of the Past and the Future, Black Leaders Say

“Nobody Knows My Name,” James Baldwin wrote. At the deepest level of the collective African-American psyche, the title was a metaphor for the blighting of black history and culture before the nadir of slavery and since.

Now, at the end of the 20th Century, which historian W. E. B. Du Bois said would be defined by “the color line,” Americans who have been called colored, Negro and black are reclaiming the label that identified them during much of their early history in the United States: African-American.

“Just as we were called colored, but were not that, and then Negro, but not that, to be called black is just as baseless. To be called African-American has cultural integrity. It puts us in our historical context,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson last month in Chicago.

A New Impetus

He was articulating views held by many black political activists, artists and intellectuals for almost two decades.

Those views, about which there is not a consensus in the black community, have gained a new impetus in recent weeks after a strategy session by some African-American leaders. At the session, participants decided it was time to press for the use of the term African-American.

“I’ve always thought the term black an anomaly,” said Ali Mazrui, the noted historian, political scientist, writer and host of the PBS documentary series “The Africans.”

“Every other group in America is identified by their cultural origins, as in the case of Jews, or their geographic origins--Greek-Americans, German-Americans, Turkish-Americans. All of a sudden you switch paradigms of geography and culture on one side to a physical feature--black skin--on the other,” which was never accurate.

‘Designated by a Physical Feature’

To perpetuate the use of black “in the vocabulary of the United States is more divisive than the proposed change” by Jackson, said Kenyan-born Mazrui, a political science professor at the University of Michigan. “As long as this particular category of Americans is designated by a physical feature, American politics will continue to have an unnecessary element of race consciousness even on issues where race should not play a part.”

Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), a key literary figure of the Pan-African Cultural Nationalist movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, noted that many people have used black and African-American interchangeably for decades. “Those people getting excited about it, like the Rev. Jackson, come to certain struggles late,” the 46-year-old poet asserted.

In reality, blacks have referred to themselves as African-Americans on and off for “the last 300 years,” said Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, director of UCLA’s Center for Afro-American studies.

“If you look at institution building in the late 18th Century in Boston, or by free blacks in Philadelphia, their organizations were frequently called African,” Mitchell-Kernan said. “The disappearance of the term, or its falling from favor, has to do with cultural politics. . . .”

But Jackson told The Times that the politics of the moment demand a new “cultural offensive.”

“Part of my motivation was looking at Watts and all the other Watts,” he said. “Our children are in this cultural vacuum, this lost syndrome.” Why? In part, because, “if you don’t know your history, you don’t know your destiny.”

Meeting with Los Angeles Times editors--one of several sessions he held with newspaper publishers across the country to persuade them to use the term African-American--Jackson said “historians have distorted history by ignoring the African roots of Western civilization.”

Further, he said language has been used by the empowered to perpetuate political and psychological powerlessness among African-Americans. “Are we the descendants of slaves or the descendants of Africans who were enslaved? There is a hell of a difference,” Jackson said.

Strengthened ties between Africa and African-Americans are in the U.S. national security interests, the former Democratic presidential candidate said, noting Africa’s vast mineral wealth and strategic location. “In Africa, the Indian and Atlantic oceans come together. Africa (is) closest to the Soviet Union on that side of the Atlantic. Between Angola, Namibia, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania are the richest deposits of that which is most vital: uranium, manganese, gold, oil, diamonds.”

In the next few years, he projected, this region will be the “heart of the industrial world’s focus.”

What, Jackson asked, does America have that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev doesn’t as “everybody’s eyes shift toward South Africa? Thirty million African-Americans. We are the congenital and historical link to Africa.

“Shall we, therefore, have a policy that African-Americans help to articulate and relate to, to protect our vital interests.”

Jackson noted that other cultures and ethnic groups have played critical roles in shaping foreign policy, for example, with Americans of European descent figuring in the plans as to how the U.S. would help rebuild Europe after World War II.

The use of the term African-American “gets us into Africans in America relating to Africa as Jews do to Israel,” he said. “So there is a lot involved in what I call this cultural offensive.”

Suggested Name Change

It was, in fact, Ramona Edelin, the head of the National Urban Coalition and the founder of the African-American studies department at Northeastern University 20 years ago, who provided Jackson with the philosophical outline of his offensive. And it was Edelin who suggested the name change during a planning session, held last month, for a “national black agenda” meeting Washington in March.

Edelin said Jackson asked her to act as official scribe for the meeting. It would be helpful, she told him, if “we refer to ourselves as African-Americans. It puts everything in context.”

The time could not be more propitious, many social scientists say, for the forging of cultural and political bonds between Africa and the black Diaspora.

But what, besides the rhetoric of political leaders, is there to unite blacks internationally? What significant cultural links exist between Africans and black Americans after centuries of separation?

The forging of political and cultural ties between African-Americans and Africa “will most certainly have an impact” on U.S. foreign policy.

“It’s an important topic and a positive development,” said Michael John, an African affairs analyst for the Heritage Foundation, the Washington-based conservative think tank. “But it’s important to note that it’s quite presumptuous to believe that Jesse Jackson speaks for all black Americans. He represents one point of view, but there are other points of view toward Africa.”

The focus on the white minority regime ruling South Africa has diverted attention from the “heinous” Marxist regimes in Ethiopia, Mozambique and Angola, John said. South Africa “certainly has to be addressed, (but it is) not the only problem on the continent.” If black Americans begin to focus on and deal with these other “malevolent” governments “objectively,” that will augur well for American foreign policy in the region.

Shortly before former Secretary of State George P. Shultz went to New York to sign accords calling for the removal of Cuban troops from Angola, he met with Jackson.

“I’ll never forget it,” Jackson said. Shultz turned to him matter-of-factly and told him: “ ‘Tomorrow I’m going to New York to sign this agreement. I’m going to have South Africa there and Cuba and Angola. I don’t know what that’s going to look like. But you have to do something to make this reconciliation. The key to making this thing work is the role the African-American community will play in it.’

“That’s a very new relationship between the African-American community and the State Deparment,” Jackson said.

But one Stanford University scholar, Hubert Marshall, a leading political scientist, challenges the notion that there is any significant Pan-African consciousness between blacks in the United States and Africans. He also questions the idea that black Americans will, in the near future, play a substantial role in U.S. foreign policy toward the continent.

“First of all, Africa is a very heterogeneous place,” he said. “People may be more or less black there in skin color, but there are several hundred languages, very little in common between these countries; and a fair number of American blacks don’t know from what part of the continent they came, but probably most came from a relatively small area of Western Africa.”

Unlike the strong identification of American Jews with Israel, he said, “I just don’t see that sort of nationalism developing among American blacks.” In the 1960s, there was the “black is beautiful movement” and a “certain amount of separatism developing among American blacks.”

That has continued to a certain degree, he said, but hasn’t grown. The anti-apartheid movement in America “has drawn a modest number of American blacks,” Marshall said.

But as a general proposition, strong African and black American linkage “just doesn’t seem to me anything likely to catch on,” the 69-year-old professor said.

Marshall, who has written on American public policy issues, readily admits he is not an expert on the dynamics of the African-American community. But his views are commonly held ones--black and white social scientists agree--because there is some truth to them.

“Afro-Americans, because of the nature of slavery, are almost the only category of Americans who have lost their original family names, so you can’t tell by seeing the name ‘Jesse Jackson’ or ‘Martin Luther King’ whether they are Anglo-Saxon or of African origin,” Mazrui said.

So they “lost a bit of their African-ity through their names--as individuals and as families. Restoring African-ity to their collective identity will help to compensate for that major loss, which came from the nakedness of slavery.”

Further, Mazrui said, the change in terms addresses the break in historical continuity between Africa and the African-Americans caused by slavery: “People forget that culture is not just something that is lose-able, it is a thing which is recoverable.

“Tell Israelis today that Hebrew is a dead language,” Mazrui noted, “and they’ll say, ‘What’s the matter with you? Have you forgotten the years since 1948?’ Just since 1948, they have brought Hebrew back to life. It has become part of Israeli life. So culture can be recovered.”

But what, for example, does African-American mean to the black person in the United States whose family is from the Caribbean?

African-Americans have “competing identities,” said Ruth Hamilton, a professor at Michigan State University, an expert on Africa, the African Diaspora and a member of the board of the Carnegie Foundation. They have “their Southern roots, their Brooklyn roots, their Caribbean roots, which may be more important for them as a primary identity” than their African heritage.

“I don’t think we can say that there is any mass-based movement” among blacks to call themselves African-American, Hamilton said. “What are the origins of these terms? They always come from the top down. This is something that Jesse Jackson is imposing. I’m not being negative about him. I’m just saying you can’t attribute (this) to the masses. The masses weren’t even concerned about being called black.”

Edelin observed: “We don’t pretend that anyone cares about a name change, in and of itself, just because some elite proposes it.”

But those at the Chicago planning meeting represented the spectrum of the African-American community, she said.

Some historians would argue that using African-American shouldn’t be a source of puzzlement. Rather, they say, why did it fall into disuse? And how did 20th-Century black leaders become so estranged from African concerns?

“Only with the founding of the American Colonization Society in 1816 did blacks begin to recoil from using the term African in referring to themselves and their institutions,” explained Sterling Stucky, the noted historian and professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. They feared that using the term African would fuel white efforts to send them back to Africa, he said, adding: “They felt no white person had the right to send them back when they had slaved to build America.”

Still, as Mitchell-Kernan of UCLA observed, many black institutions retained their African identification, most notably the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Stucky said.

But after World War II, culminating in the “Cold War years of Roy Wilkerson’s leadership of the NAACP,” was a time of “frenzied integrationism,” Stucky noted. And there was “no respectable black leader on the scene evincing any sort of interest in Africa--neither the NAACP or the Urban League.”

This, he said, “was an example of historical discontinuity, the likes of which we, as a people, had not seen before.” Before then, for more than a century and a half, black leaders were Pan-Africanist, including Frederick Douglass. “He recognized that Africa was important and that somehow one had to redeem the motherland in order to be genuinely respected in the New World. And thus, he wrote one long essay treating stereotypes with respect to Africa.”

Jackson recently traveled to Africa where he met with the leaders of Angola, Gabon, Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe. “Every head of state he visited concurred that they will officially refer to us as African-Americans,” Edelin said.

While no one has yet raised a significant fuss over the use of the term African-American--”No problem,” columnist William Raspberry wrote, “I can learn to call myself, to think of myself as African-American as easily as I learned to call myself colored, Negro and black.”

Some ask why not use “Afro-American?”

An Afro, Jackson recently told a Los Angeles audience, is a hairdo--borrowing a line from poet Madhubuti.

“Though Jesse Jackson might disagree. Afro-American was and is an abbreviation for African-American,” Mitchell-Kernan said.

And Madhubuti, whose best-selling works include “Think Black” and “Don’t Cry, Scream,” said: “I’m not giving up black.” He will keep using it with African-American.

“The color question is very crucial,” Madhubuti said in a telephone interview from his Chicago home. “This whole black (versus) African-American thing has to be used with care and understanding.”

The use of black, he said, “is a symbol. We cannot give it up after taking it into something positive and let others use it as they see fit.”

Precisely because African-American is a positive affirmation of group identity without the polarizing connotation of black, many say they prefer the term.

Hamilton, the Michigan State University expert, said she is willing to call herself African-American.

“But the critical question is: So what?” she said. “Does it really change the social conditions and consciousness of people.”

She noted the massive drug problem in black communities, the soaring high school dropout rate, the large number of young men in prisons, the lack of educational and employment opportunities.

Blacks are not a “monolithic group--we have class differences . . . so it’s unfair to say that these should be the concerns of everybody,” she said. “But the extent to which we still have a large number of black people in this country impoverished . . . we must be concerned about those issues over and above whether the labeling is correct.”

Those concerns, Edelin agrees, are precisely what she wants to address. But self-perception, group identity are part of the struggle to improve life for African-Americans, she said.

“Only culture moves people forward, and we are not systematically developing our culture at this point,” Edelin said. “We are working very hard one by one, but not working together.”

There are individual Africans and African-Americans doing everything that needs to be done, “but they are not doing it for us and we are not doing it together.”

She added that in the context of developing a political agenda that would “move us forward, reclaim our children, create markets and jobs so that we don’t continue with poverty, ignorance, poor health--all the conditions that we face right now--I said one way to get started on developing this cultural context is to consistently refer to ourselves as African-Americans and to understand the tie we have to African people throughout the world.”

Du Bois, about whom Edelin did her doctoral dissertation, “was right as a prophet: The 20th Century would be the problem of the color line,” she said. “But it is up to us to be sure that’s not the problem of the 21st Century.”