Letter to the Editor: African-American is today’s colored

Hundreds of millions are being spent on a museum whose name, “African-American”  perpetuates Jim Crow toward Black people by bestowing a stereotyped and false racial identity. Africa is not a racial identity. Africa is a geo-political location with 53 sovereign countries populated from mostly white people to mostly black people each with a distinct language, government and culture.

“African-American” segregates black people in America among ourselves. It means only descendants of slaves and ignores black Americans from Brazil, India, Mexico, Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, France, Spain, Saudia Arabia, Pacific Islands, etc, etc,. Non-slave descendants accept being identified as black but reject the identity of “African-American”. Black and African-American are not synonymous.

Use of “African-American” distorts, sanitizes and revises America’s racial history by inferring – through a name – citizenship, identity, status and acceptance where none existed. No oral or written history, newspaper account, slave poster, judicial or legislative record, book, biography, military record or anything else identifies black people as anything other than Negro, black, colored and nigger. Who was an “African-American” slave? What citizenship and status is the Smithsonian referring to when it cites “African-American” soldiers? Blacks who were harshly segregated and lynched on and off bases? Blacks who were denied voting and burial rights well into the 1970’s?  The term is a distorting and false as identifying the Wright Brothers as astronauts.

“African-American” is today’s “colored.” Adopt historical, social, linguistic accuracy and identify black people as Black.

Charles Mosley
Thibodaux, Louisiana
Past president of Lafourche Parish NAACP