noun : an American of African and especially of black African descent;
A Black American of African ancestry;
an American whose ancestors were born in Africa
adjective :used to describe African-Americans; pertaining to or characteristic of Americans of African ancestry
Usage Note: The Oxford English
Dictionary contains evidence of the use of
black with reference to African peoples as early as 1400, and certainly the word has been in wide use in racial and ethnic contexts ever since. However, it was not until the late 1960s that
black (or
Black) gained its present status as a self-chosen ethnonym with strong connotations of racial pride, replacing the then-current Negro among Blacks and non-Blacks alike with remarkable speed. Equally significant is the degree to which Negro became discredited in the process, reflecting the profound changes taking place in the
Black community during the tumultuous years of the civil rights and Black Power movements. The recent success of African American offers an interesting contrast in this regard. Though by no means a modern coinage, African American achieved sudden prominence at the end of the 1980s when several Black leaders, including Jesse Jackson, championed it as an alternative ethnonym for Americans of African descent. The appeal of this term is obvious, alluding as it does not to skin color but to an ethnicity constructed of geography, history, and culture, and it won rapid acceptance in the media alongside similar forms such as Asian American, Hispanic American, and Italian American. But unlike what happened a generation earlier, African American has shown little sign of displacing or discrediting
black, which remains both popular and positive. The difference may well lie in the fact that the campaign for African American came at a
time of relative social and political stability, when Americans in general and Black Americans in particular were less caught up in issues involving radical change than they were in the 1960s. ·
Black is sometimes capitalized in its racial sense, especially in the African-American press, though the lowercase form is still widely used by authors of all races. The capitalization of
Black does raise ancillary problems for the treatment of the term
white. Orthographic evenhandedness would seem to require the use of uppercase
White, but this form might be taken to imply that whites constitute a
single ethnic group, an issue that is certainly debatable. Uppercase
White is also sometimes associated with the writings of white supremacist groups, a sufficient reason of itself for many to dismiss it. On the other hand, the use of lowercase
white in the same context as uppercase Black will obviously raise questions as to how and why the writer has distinguished between the two groups. There is no entirely happy solution to this problem. In all likelihood, uncertainty as to the mode of styling of
white has dissuaded many publications from adopting the capitalized form Black.
