Defining the "African-American"

IllmaticDelta

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The three cultural streams that makeup AA identity are things I have little to no knowledge of. Recommend a book or documentary, I would love to read up on them, the link you provided doesn't work for me.

I posted a few in this thread

the slave traditions of the antebellum South

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the free Creole or Mulatto elite traditions of the lower South

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The Black Yankees


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Part detective tale, part social and cultural narrative, "Black Gotham" is Carla Peterson's riveting account of her quest to reconstruct the lives of her nineteenth-century ancestors. As she shares their stories and those of their friends, neighbours, and business associates, she illuminates the greater history of African-American elites in New York City. "Black Gotham" challenges many of the accepted "truths" about African-American history, including the assumption that the phrase "nineteenth-century black Americans" means enslaved people, that "New York state before the Civil War" refers to a place of freedom, and that a black elite did not exist until the twentieth century. Beginning her story in the 1820s, Peterson focuses on the pupils of the Mulberry Street School, the graduates of which went on to become eminent African-American leaders. She traces their political activities as well as their many achievements in trade, business, and the professions against the backdrop of the expansion of scientific racism, the trauma of the Civil War draft riots, and the rise of Jim Crow. Told in a vivid, fast-paced style, "Black Gotham" is an important account of the rarely acknowledged achievements of nineteenth-century African Americans and brings to the forefront a vital yet forgotten part of American history and culture



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I can only give you my perception as an outsider looking in. Growing up, I cannot tell you how many times I've heard my AA brethrens say that they don't have an identity. Whether as a kid, as an adult, IRL or in the media or AA art/literature, the recurring theme has been because of slavery AAs lost their African identity and lack a unifying cultural ethnic identity.

there are aframs who say this because they actually don't have a grasp of afram culture in it's regional flavors, roots vs mainstream and it's african derived-afrocreole nature. Most of those types only know what's mainstream pop culture. Many think Afram culture started with 1970's HipHop:hhh:





I said, White Americans do not really have an outright ethnic identity. There are some ethnic enclaves among whites, but those are mainly newcomers, by the 3rd generation they are fully integrated into whiteness. For example, is there a clear and distinct culture for the original white Americans (the slave traders, confederacy, american revolution, etc)? Nope, basic whiteness :francis:

I would say yes

Old Stock Americans, Old Pioneer Stock, or Anglo-Americans are people who are descended from the original settlers of the Thirteen Colonies,[1] of mostly Northwestern European ancestry, who immigrated in the 17th and the 18th centuries.[2][3][4][5][6][7]

An American identity was formed in the Thirteen Colonies because of intermarriage between different ethnic groups, such as the English, French Huguenots, Ulster Scots, Dutch, Swedes, Welsh, and Germans and its distance from Britain.[8][9][10]

Appalachia - Wikipedia

Old-time music - Wikipedia


I am probably guilty of this.

yup.....the thing is, many people only know mainstream afram pop culture but not the afram, roots culture that gave birth to the pop version. The pop version gets appropriated by everyone but in this case, when it get's appropriated and reproduced by "other" blacks, the same "blacks" end up looking at those things as generic "black" culture of all blacks while somehow dissociating it from it's afram origins. So basically afram pop culture becomes, non-afram, SHARED UNIVERSAL BLACK CULTURE.
 

IllmaticDelta

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From another thead on afram history in regards to Americo-Liberians as Free People of Color and how authentically Afram they may or may not be at the time of their emigration. Basically, this shows how complex the Afram identity is and how varied the experiences that shaped them really are.


The reason I can't fully agree is because out of the 4 million Black people who were in this country in 1860 -- 3,950,528 were enslaved in the South.

After the act abolishing the African Slave Trade in 1807 - the majority of Black people tripled in America -- due to Black people who were already enslaved/born in slavery --- and they were breeded and/or the offspring of the enslaved and they were enslaved and so on.

The majority of those who entered into Liberia were born in the mid to late 1700's and they were indeed descendants of either slaves who were emancipated fairly early -- or the children of white slave masters who had children with their slaves (concubines) and freed them - sometimes setting them up with land and money. The were also not classified as "black" "negro" due to many being "mulatto" or "octaroon."

The vast majority of ancestors of African Americans today come from the Black people who were enslaved in the deep South - states with the highest slave population - which were Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia. The were usually classified as "Negro" or "Black" and they were not freed until emancipation. Even if they were "M" aka Mulatto on the Census in 1860 - they usually were the offspring of rapes due to breeding and just violence by any white man -- from owner to overseer. Not due to being "concubines." And they were still enslaved and married other enslaved people who were listed as "Black."

When they became Freedman/women - the majority of them stayed in the South and yes some did go North - even Canada - but not a significant amount went to Liberia.

In the end, around 13,000 emigrants had sailed to Liberia. -- and most of them were "free people of color" who were from the set of people who were "free people of color" who had never been enslaved or emancipated by their father (white owner) in the late 1700's. Some were the slaves of these people who they emancipated and brought them to Liberia with them -- Most of these people became successful were able to see some benefits such as also owning slaves or good jobs--- and many other things that the Black "Negro" enslaved would never see for years to come -- even after they were emancipated.


my thoughts on the intertwinedness of free people of color vs directly enslaved and their role on afram history and modern day afram identity

yes but they're intertwined with free people of color lineages

Blair Underwood

I always love when Who Do You Think You Are? features African-Americans because our history is so unique. How did your perspective change when it comes to being Black in America after participating in the show?

Great question. I learned so much doing the show. Everybody has a brick wall they hit when they start doing the linage and history. Most often, when you track African-American history, the census of 1870 is where you hit that brick wall because of slavery. We were able to break that wall three times, which was amazing. I discovered a whole linage of family members who were free people of color in the Virginia south. That was all an education to me. I had a whole line of free people of color in my family, going back to 1790. Their names are documented in the free people of color registers. I never knew that!

Q&A: Blair Underwood Discovers His Roots






Puffy and LL Cool J Discover Free Ancestors Pre-Emancipation in “Finding Your Roots”

In separate experiences, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and James Todd Smith, also known as LL Cool J, sat across from host Dr. Henry Louis Gates to learn their family trees host record of their ancestors having being freed before the Emancipation of 1863.

While Combs learned his third great-grandparents were living as free African-Americans in Maryland, Smith was learning of his great-great grandparents who lived as free men and women.

Both men’s stories shared similar characteristics such as these: their relatives were inhabitants of “free” states or states where slavery had long worn out its purpose. For Puffy it was Maryland, a state that had seen thousands of slave owners releasing their slaves for both moral and financial reasons.

LL Cool J’s great-grandparents, however, were born into the states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, where slavery had been abolished long ago, revealing that these relatives were born into freedom.

Puffy and LL Cool J Discover Free Ancestors Pre-Emancipation in "Finding Your Roots" | The Source






Finding Your Roots: John Legend and Wanda Sykes

This episode was particularly interesting because it was able to trace their family back to free people of color that were able to break their families from slavery before the civil war and the emancipation of slaves. There were two very interesting stories featured in both families. In John Legend's family there was the story of his ancestor Peyton Polly (This link leads to a book with more details about what happened). Peyton Polly's seven children after having moved to Ohio to escape the slavery they were freed from were stolen in the dead of night by a group of white men who then sold them back into slavery in the states of Virginia and Kentucky. After a series of court battles and testimonies the four children sold back into slavery in Kentucky were released but those in Virginia had to wait until emancipation to be released.

The other story was the story of one of Wanda Sykes' ancestors who was able to gain one branch's family's independence seeing as how she was a white indentured servant. She had an illegitimate child by an African slave and that child was born free. Elizabeth Banks (Wanda's ninth great grandmother), was the woman who "fornicated with a negro slave"giving birth to her eighth great grandmother Mary Banks. Seeing as how her mother was a white indentured servant and not a slave, the status from the mother was passed down to the child granting her freedom.

Towards the end they used DNA analysis again to find the African tribes the guests' mtDNA belongs to, also they were able to find John Legend's y-DNA connection.


John Legend's mtDNA connection to the Mende tribe in Sierra Leone

John Legend's y-DNA connection to the Fula tribe in Guinea-Bissau

Wanda Sykes' mtDNA connection to the Tikar/Fulani tribe in Cameroon

Margarett Cooper's mtDNA connection to the Temne tribe in Sierra Leone
It was really cool again to see this analysis and maybe hopefully one day I'll be able to get it done for the father's mtDNA line which is part of the Haplogroup L from Africa found mainly in Bantu speakers.

http://boricuagenes.blogspot.com/2012/05/finding-your-roots-john-legend-and.html

Wanda Sykes’s Free Ancestors in the 1600s and 1700s | Finding Your Roots

“The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African American we have ever researched.”

The unique thing about Wanda is that she descends from 10 generations of free Virginia mulattos, which is more rare than descendants of mixed-race African-Americans who descend from English royalty.”

Wanda Sykes Traces Roots Back To 17th Century


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Three African-American guests delve deep into their family trees, discovering unexpected stories that challenge our assumptions about black history. Find local listings here: TV Schedule | Watch | Finding Your Roots

Bryant Gumbel learns that his surname comes from a German Jewish community by way of his second great grandfather — a white man who arrived in America midway through the Civil War. He also learns that on a different line of his father’s family, his second great grandfather was a manumitted slave who signed up for the Confederate army in New Orleans, then changed sides when the Union arrived in his city.

Tonya Lewis-Lee, a descendant of free people of color going back centuries on her father’s side, learns about her mother’s unknown heritage, including her third great-grandfather, a slave who fought for the Union only to struggle with poverty later in life.

Suzanne Malveaux discovers that her roots include a black slave owner, a French-Canadian fur trader, and a Native American from the Kaskaskia tribe. Along the way, our guests are reminded that there is no universal African American narrative — that there are as many ways to be black as there are black people.


 

xoxodede

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From another thead on afram history in regards to Americo-Liberians as Free People of Color and how authentically Afram they may or may not be at the time of their emigration. Basically, this shows how complex the Afram identity is and how varied the experiences that shaped them really are.





my thoughts on the intertwinedness of free people of color vs directly enslaved and their role on afram history and modern day afram identity



and
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Three African-American guests delve deep into their family trees, discovering unexpected stories that challenge our assumptions about black history. Find local listings here: TV Schedule | Watch | Finding Your Roots

Bryant Gumbel learns that his surname comes from a German Jewish community by way of his second great grandfather — a white man who arrived in America midway through the Civil War. He also learns that on a different line of his father’s family, his second great grandfather was a manumitted slave who signed up for the Confederate army in New Orleans, then changed sides when the Union arrived in his city.

Tonya Lewis-Lee, a descendant of free people of color going back centuries on her father’s side, learns about her mother’s unknown heritage, including her third great-grandfather, a slave who fought for the Union only to struggle with poverty later in life.

Suzanne Malveaux discovers that her roots include a black slave owner, a French-Canadian fur trader, and a Native American from the Kaskaskia tribe. Along the way, our guests are reminded that there is no universal African American narrative — that there are as many ways to be black as there are black people.




Thanks :smile:

You also may find these links on Bryant Gumbel and his "Finding Your Roots" Episode interesting. It mainly deals with HLG and The Root aiding in the Black Confederate Solider myth.

Henry Louis Gates’s Betrayal of Bryant Gumbel and History

Henry Louis Gates and PBS Fall For Black Confederate Myth…Again

Henry Louis Gates and PBS Fall For Black Confederate Myth…Again
 
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Apollo Creed

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African-American was initially for Black Americans who ancestors were enslaved in America. Now, it's for everybody - so that is why the term needs to go away.

I think going forward -- we should be differentiated by if your ancestors were enslaved here in America and those who weren't.

Black American Culture has it's roots and beginnings in our ancestors who were enslaved. It was created by them and their descendants. That's how I look at it.

I`ll give my two cents on this.

I agree that there is a term that needs to be defined for those who are descendants of American Slavery. They have been in America since day 1 and have created distinct culture that they can be classified as an ethnic group. I also feel that there is enough diversity within this ethnic group that one could technically say there are regional "tribes" that roll into this ethnic group.

I would say "Black American" would be the universal designation for a Black Person BORN in America and African American would be the specific ethnic identifier of an individual who is a descendant of American Slavery. To not have an ethnic identifier specifically for this group is disrespectful to the people who built this country. At the end of the day Africa is the "root" and source of the initial tools black people used to innovate and create new culture specific to them in America.

Also to the person who says AAs dont have a "culture" this isn't true. I would argue that AAs face the same issue Blacks face globally in that Systematic White Supremacy teaches them their culture isn't "sexy" thus younger generations tend to abandon family traditions and customs.

Usually in the Rural areas of countries you see traditional cultures being the strongest, and when you get to major cities people tend to look down on this stuff and deem it "country" or "out of touch". My girl friend is from Rural GA and one thanks giving I had a good convo with her fam on the topic on people abandoning tradition and thinking they are "too good" for how their family in rural areas "act". I saw the same thing first hand with my own family where I have cousins who were born in Liberia in the 60s but don't know our native tongue because they group up in Monrovia around white missionaries, meanwhile my mom who grew up in the rural area and her older brothers know our language. Like I said I often see the same dynamic in America where people from Northern Cities visit fam in the south or move to the south and look at us as "country" yet these are the areas where tradition has been kept in tact.
 

IllmaticDelta

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The first impact of immigration is demographic. The 70 million immigrants who have arrived since the founding of the republic (formal records have only been kept since 1820) are responsible for the majority of the contemporary American population.[2] Most Americans have acquired a sense of historical continuity from America’s founding, but this is primarily the result of socialization and education, not descent. The one segment of the American population with the longest record of historical settlement are African Americans. Almost all African Americans are the descendants of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century arrivals.[3]

The Impact of Immigration on American Society: Looking Backward to the Future
 

IllmaticDelta

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to add to this post---> Defining the "African-American"


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Jeroen Dewulf is the Queen Beatrix Professor in Dutch Studies and an Associate Professor of German Studies at UC Berkeley, where he also directs the Institute of European Studies. His new book, The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves (University Press of Mississippi, 2017), departs from a study of nineteenth-century Pinkster, which has generally been considered a syncretic Dutch-Afro performance clustered in the formerly Dutch colonial territories of New York. Through a careful excavation of these rituals, he resituates an apparently local story in a much broader and deeper Atlantic context. His study casts light on the origins of Pinkster in a very different syncretism–of Iberian and African cultures on African soil–and the crucial role of mutual-aid associations in its transmission and promotion. For students of the intellectual and cultural history of the Atlantic, it provides a compelling model for circum-Atlantic history (to borrow from David Armitage’s typology), while encouraging us to reconsider our understanding of syncretism.

Jeroen: It is important to highlight the topic of language as such. Even within the Dutch community in America, preserving Dutch attachment to the language is an interesting topic, and you see as a general rule that as soon as people of Dutch descent achieved positions of power, their attachment to the language tended to disappear. And those who held on to Dutch were often farmers or rural inhabitants, which has consequences on the way the story is told.

On top of language, we have the matter of religion, another important element here. The Dutch had their own religion in a way: the Dutch Reformed Church. And having your own religion isolated the Dutch community from others. And then you also clearly see a division within the Dutch community, between those who abandon this history as soon as New Netherland becomes New York, and those who hold onto it. And those who hold onto it are not necessarily those who write. So, you have relatively few documents in which you hear a Dutch voice commenting on Dutch traditions in America.

As a result of this, the way we have told the history of New Netherlands is one heavily influenced by an Anglo-Saxon perspective, which would look at this Dutch heritage and make it correspond to a perception that they already had of it. It is also very important to keep in mind that there was no such thing as Dutch newspapers, so the voice of the media was an English voice.

Derek: Your study explores a sort of “double erasure” in this context, of both Dutch voices and members of the Afro-Dutch community.

Jeroen: Who is aware that in the mid-eighteenth century that about 10-15% of blacks in New York still spoke Dutch? The Dutch and African linguistic heritage of the region are similarly forgotten. Little attention has been given to the fact that African-American history is a multilingual history, and not just in the sense of bringing different languages from Africa.

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Middle panel of 1733 painting by John Heaton of Van Bergen farm near Albany, NY: One of the few images depicting African American slaves on a Dutch-owned farm at a time when about 10-15% of the slaves living in the states of New York and New Jersey spoke Dutch.

Derek: Ironically, then, the erasure of Dutch voices from the nineteenth-century record seems to contribute to the erasure of the African and Portuguese origins of Pinkster. Your book takes a phenomenon—Pinkster– that has also, like this Dutch-American history, been interpreted in a very malleable way, and pulls it from a local context into a much more complex Atlantic context. In the process, the long-imagined Dutch influence on this Afro-American phenomenon recedes, and it becomes much less a story of the Dutch legacy in America. Much of the past few decades of historiography on the Dutch colonies in the Western Hemisphere have sought to reinsert them into both US and Atlantic history, so in an interesting way your book departs from this—indeed, it distances Dutch influence from a circum-Atlantic phenomenon of Pinkster, and directs us to see its roots elsewhere.

Jeroen: The book didn’t take me in the direction I was planning to go, and in a certain sense the book wrote itself. Originally, I thought this would be about performance culture, but it ended up being much more about mutual aid and solidarity and community-building. I also expected it to be a much more Dutch book, which it did not turn out to be. That was a surprise to me in the sense that what became clear is that we are speaking about a time period when Dutch Atlantic history was starting, and as a newcomer you naturally don’t build things out of nowhere: You build on what is already there. Especially when it comes to the process of slavery, we see how strong the continuation of Iberian model was among those who took over from the Spanish and Portuguese in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. I felt that this element has been underestimated by people who write about Atlantic History.

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We still have this assumption that scholars choose “their” nation, and then tend to give too much importance to the colonizer of a specific area: If you focus on New Netherland you focus on the Dutch, if you write about New England you focus on the English, etc. But especially when you focus on a field such as slavery, its Atlantic complexity forces you to use a perspective that tries to capture this vast area, and you realize that holding on to this one-nation perspective is just not providing you with the answers to the challenging questions that manuscripts raise. Pinkster is a good example of this. It has traditionally been reduced to a “syncretic Dutch-African” tradition, which is true in the sense that there certainly are Dutch and African elements to be found in the tradition, but to say that something is syncretic doesn’t mean much. In fact, Pinkster is so much more complex than just a “mixture of Dutch and African” elements.


more here--> On The Pinkster King and the King of the Kongo: An Interview with Jeroen Dewulf
 

IllmaticDelta

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On July 4th 1827 the last slaves* in New York State became free, and the next day the Black population held a huge parade and celebration along Broadway in New York City. This was a joyous moment, but it came over half a century after the Declaration of Independence declared that “all men are created equal”, and over 25 years after New York had first passed a law mandating freedom for slaves on a gradual basis. It took years of struggle, hardship, and frustration to end the institution of slavery in New York, and this process was mirrored in most of the other Northern States. Because the Southern States fought a war to preserve slavery, the long and hard road to emancipation in the North has been overshadowed and forgotten. The map/slideshow above illustrates this process by showing the percentage of the population that were slaves from 1790 to 1860.

*75 slaves remained in bondage in rural areas of New York according to the 1830 Census, they were likely held by Southerners who until 1841 were allowed to bring slaves into New York for up to 9 months.

Slavery was difficult to end in the North because slaves made up a significant proportion of the population and were hugely important to the economy. The first U.S. census in 1790 counted 40,086 slaves in the 8 Northern States, for a total of about 2% of the population. In some important northern areas slaves made up an even more significant proportion of the population, such as in Kings County (modern-day Brooklyn) where 1 in every 3 residents was held in bondage. Every Northern state except Vermont and Massachusetts (which Maine was a part of at the time) still held slaves in 1790. Slavery in the North wasn’t limited to household servants either: archeological digs have revealed evidence that huge slaveholding plantations existed in the North as late as the beginning of the 19th century.

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The map above shows the proportion of slaves for each Northern county according to the 1790 census. The most obvious geographic pattern is the huge concentration of slavery radiating outwards from New York City, with slaves making up a significant proportion of the population in New Jersey, Upstate New York, and southern Connectdicut and Rhode Island. The only other areas with a large proportion of slaves are two pockets in southern and western Pennsylvania. Looking at the 10 Northern counties with the highest proportion of slaves, we can see that all 10 are in New York or New Jersey and most are in the area around New York City:

County (Borough) State Slave % of Population
Kings (Brooklyn)
NY 32.58%
Richmond (Staten Island)
NY 19.73%
Bergen NJ 18.26%
Somerset NJ 14.72%
Queens (Queens) NY 14.41%
Ulster NY 9.92%
Monmouth NJ 9.43%
Middlesex NJ 8.26%
New York (Manhattan) NY 7.17%
Suffolk NY 6.68%
The high proportion of slavery around New York City is explained by the city’s long history of importing slaves, dating back to its original founding as the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. New Amsterdam faced a severe labor shortage within a few years of it’s founding, and began importing slaves in 1626. Importation of slaves continued even after the British took control of the area. By 1703, 42 percent of all households in New York City owned slaves, second among American cities only to Charleston SC. After the American Revolution the tide began to turn against slavery in the area, as the Black and abolitionist communities campaigned against slavery, and as slaves increasingly rebelled by running away from their masters. Nonetheless, it still took New York and New Jersey until 1799 and 1804 respectively to pass laws instituting gradual emancipation, making them the last two Northern States to do so. Gradual emancipation moved especially slowly in New Jersey, to the point that when the Civil War broke out in 1860 there were still 18 enslaved people in the “free” state!

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Despite both New Jersey and New York dragging their feet on the issue of slavery, the institution declined consistently in the decades after Independence. The number of slaves in the Northern States decreased in every US census from 1790 to 1860. The mirror image of this trend was occurring in the South, where the number of slaves increased by an average of almost 30% a decade. Thus while the decline in the total number of slaves in the North is significant, the fall in the North’s share of all slaves is even more impressive:

screen-shot-2016-02-20-at-1-17-59-pm.png


Nonetheless, while the decline of slavery in the North may seem rapid to us today, it obviously took painfully long for those in bondage at the time.

The death of slavery in the North teaches us that even the most vile of institutions take time to destroy. This applies to slavery in the South as well: the Emancipation Proclamation did not free all slaves in the United States, and even after the Thirteenth Amendment banned slavery there were still Blacks being held in near-bondage under the South’s sharecropping systems.

One last thing to realize when talking about the destruction of slavery in the North is that the role of politicians and abolitionists is often overemphasized, while the role of slaves in ending this institution is overlooked. It took a huge number of slaves running away from their masters in the 1790s to convince the New York legislature to pass a bill for gradual emancipation. After gradual emancipation was put in place, the death of slavery in New York was sped up by an “epidemic” of slaves fleeing. The likelihood that their slaves would run also encouraged slaveowners in the North to free them voluntarily. It was Dubois that pointed out that “slaves freed themselves” during the Civil War, and this applies equally to the end of slavery in the North.

Slavery in the Northern United States, 1790 to 1860
 
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