While recently reading an article about the first black president, William Jefferson Clinton, I became a little bugged by his usage of the term, African-American. I thought to myself, if Bill Clinton is the first black president and we are now supposed to call black people African-American, why do we not call Clinton the first African-American president? Blacks in this country have undergone a number of name changes over the years. Most of the old photographs and video of the segregated south show signs with the words "whites only" and "colored" written on them. Now that really did not make sense. Colored could have meant anything. Of course we all know that colored meant black, but it still seemed like a stupid label. Later on, it became acceptable to use the term black to describe someone of African descent. Although it is not politically correct today to call someone black, most black people are alright with it. In fact, they are quite proud to be black. But where did the term African-American come from, and when did it become politically correct to hyphenate someone who is a natural born American citizen? I can understand why a first generation African immigrant would call himself African-American, but it just seems wrong to hyphenate a group of people who were born in this country and are as equal in it as anybody else. What is so odd, is that many black people in America are not even 50% African descent. Although I am one quarter Italian, you would not call me Italian-American would you? Yet you would call the very European looking Vanessa Williams, African American. And what about Tiger Woods? Why does he still get to be called African-American? Wouldn’t it be just as correct to label him an Asian American?
The term Native-American is another one that doesn’t make sense to me. Is not everyone who was born in the North American continent a Native American? That would also make Tiger Woods a Native American, in addition to being an African-American and an Asian-American. You say that the term Native American is reserved to those who belong to the tribes that inhabited this land before the evil Europeans came along, but are those people actually native to this continent? Did their ancestors not cross the Bering Straight a few thousand years ago?
Forgive me for all of this foolishness, but it just seems silly that we have to label people like we do. Why don’t we just end all of this nonsense and stop using all of these labels? America is most definitely a melting pot. Regardless of what skin color you are, or where your parents came from, we are all equally American. I love the story of how Bear Bryant used USC running back Sam Cunningham to integrate Southeastern football. After Cunningham had run all over Bama’s “skinny white boys”, the Bear brought Cunningham into the Alabama locker room and said, “this is a football player”. He didn’t say, “This is a really good black football player”. He said, “This is a football player”. Later in the 70’s, when Bryant's team was fully integrated, a sportswriter asked him how many black players he had on the team. The Bear said, “ We don’t have any black players, we only have football players”. Why can’t we just call people American? I still think everyone should be proud of their culture and try to preserve it to a certain extent, but in the end, we are all American, regardless of race or culture. I am sorry, but you will never hear me identify an American with a hyphen. I will just stick to terms like black, white, and American. I guess that makes me politically incorrect. Oh well.
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