Damn!

Now why does he have to agree with me on this?

I'm just glad I've been Black all along. I'd hate to have anyone think McWhorter had impact on any decision I made.

I favored the term "African American," awkward though it is, because it is a standard nomenclature. Let's look for a moment at the discussion of who's African American:

(a) Colin Powell and others whose parents immigrated from the Caribbean, are certainly African in the sense that I am European; and they are certainly American, in that they are members of the US community, AND, the Caribbean is part of America

(b) Barak Obama's parents, and Amadou Diallo certainly, experienced many aspects of being Black (in Mr McWhorter's sense of the term); in some cases, I suspect this was pleasurable, while in other cases it was obviously painful. The thing European American observers frequently fail to understand, IMO, is that anger in the Black community is not over something that occurred 139 years ago, or even 39 years ago: slavery and segregation are merely historical context, not in and of themselves provocations for rage. So AK's assertion that only a person descended from slaves (or, as in the case of a few African Americans, "free" Negroes of the antebellum era) can understand these things is succumbing to a fallacy usually confined to Whites.

Ralph Ellison referred to the American Negro as "a most complex form of western man" (Shadow & Act, IIRC). It took me a while to understand the richness of this remark: the African American is in many respects the exemplar of industrial, frontier North American society because there is less opportunity for escape to the faux "Old World" of suburbs. It's also true that the older forms of ideological belonging, the ones that shape European American political discourse, are untenable. Toughness, implacability, military readiness, and unquestioning devotion to the tribes goals of conquest,IMO, are ideals that are incompatible with the modern world of global desertification, gigantic capital flows, and nuclear/quasi-nuclear munitions. IN this sense, I would say that in the future we will all [have to be] African Americans--with the new, multilayered type of belonging that implies.

The problem is, we need a name for Americans whose roots go back over 300 years who aren't white. African-American is standard nomenclature, yes…for immigrants. We've been here to long for that to apply.

Technically we should own "American" as fully as any WASP. Actually, when you visualize an American you visualize one of several white male stereotypes.

We need a word that specifically brings us to mind.

Thanks for the link to McWhorter's piece. I, unfortunately, think that this is much ado about nothing. I certainly have no objections whatsoever if he and anyone else chooses to call themselves black or whatever they find appropriately descriptive. This desire for and debate over an all-encompassing, or at least a reasonably comprehensive, nomenclature has been a part of the symbolic struggle for people of African descent in the United States since at least the 1830s, if not before. The writers Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison, for example, continued to use the word "Negro" long after it was declared passe. In fact, Ellison's posthumously published novel "Juneteenth" is dedicated to what he calls the "long lost tribe of American Negroes." And Albert Murray and at least two of his intellectual disciples, Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis, still refer to black people as Negroes. Again, I find none of this off-putting or objectionable. Indeed, I find it enjoyable because it reflects a lively diversity and zest for meaning that far too many people think is missing from the lives of black Americans.

I forgot to add the following: the debate about what to call ourselves in the black community usually closely presages or accompanies some wholesale shift or call for such a shift in the consciousness and status of people of African descent in the United States. While I don't wish to impugn John McWhorter's motives in this regard I am mindful of the fact that many of his political colleagues strenuously object now (and in the past) to blacks and others using any hyphenated nomenclature to describe themselves. Terms such as Chinese-American, Mexican-American or Japanese-American are simply anathema to this crowd and although they would claim that they have similar objections to terms such as Polish-American or Italian-American the reality is that their intellectual predecessors did not in fact raise any public objections to such hyphenations when they were used almost exclusively by white ethnic groups.

Again, I don't think it would be fair or appropriate to ascribe McWhorter's views to any effort on his part to curry favor or ingratiate himself with his political colleagues and employers. His declaration, in my opinion, is simply part of a long line of debate that has accompanied black people's struggles here in the United States. What I admire is that it shows that American Negroes will never relinquish their desire to say who they are and to call themselves whatever they please. If other folks find this confusing then that is the way the prune wrinkles or the aftermath of slavery gets played out.