American Pied

[steepholm]

Recently I was reminded by a linguaphiles post of the habit in the USA of calling any person of African extraction, no matter their nationality, "African American". The most egregious example I ever witnessed (and I wish it had been preserved on Youtube, because it would have made a lovely pair for the Dalai Llama pizza joke moment) was when an interviewer asked Nelson Mandela his opinion, "speaking as an African American". That was a few years ago now, but here's a mint-fresh example from a post on Disney movies, which mentions The Color of Friendship (2000). In this movie a white, politically-complacent, apartheid-era South African girl, Mahree, goes on an exchange trip to the USA, where she stays with the family of an American girl, Piper - not realising until she arrives that her hosts are black. In true Disney style, she learns some important life lessons through friendship, and eventually goes back to South Africa with very different opinions from those with which she arrived. In the words of the post: "When Mehree returns to South Africa an enlightened girl and shows Flora, her African American maid, the freedom flag she had sewn into her coat , it is very moving." Needless to say, Flora is South African.

Well, it's fun to stand and point at the insularity, of course, but I'm more interested in the way language is working here. I'm assuming (perhaps rashly) that whoever wrote that sentence doesn't actually believe that the maid Flora is American. In that case, the obvious inference is that the individual semantic components of the phrase "African American" have become fused into one, purely racial epithet, the "American" functioning semantically as "person originating from place that I just mentioned". But does this happen with any of the other double-barrelled epithets in common use? Do Italians in Italy ever get referred to as Italian Americans? Or Chinese people from China as Chinese Americans? I don't think so - at least I've not seen it. It seems something else is going on, then.

Another comparison might be with the way Americans talk about white people as Caucasian (where did that come from, by the way?) without implying that they're from the Caucasus - unless of course they're Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. But my impression is that "Caucasian" is used as a semi-technical word - I've mostly heard it in police descriptions - not ordinary conversation.

Looking closer to home, a comparison might be with English people saying "English" when they mean "British" - which is of course a reflection of English dominance of the Union and the privilege-cum-complacency that that engenders. Perhaps we can extrapolate something similar for "African American", re. American dominance of the entire planet? But that still doesn't explain why this usage is restricted to people of African origin. For a while I wondered whether it might have something to do with the fact that Africa is a continent rather than a country - but then, Asians don't tend to get called Asian Americans, do they?

I still don't have a satisfactory answer to this. Thoughts?

Comments

[cmcmck]

Since the hub is a Scot I would never in a million years get away with that one! :o)

[thistleingrey]

The other day I heard someone in their late twenties refer to individuals of East Asian descent with a tenuous or non-existent US connection as "Asian Americans." It was someone explaining their doctoral thesis chapter, in a context where I wasn't free to follow up with my ?! reaction to the label's use.

"Caucasian" was much more common during the 1980s than it is now, in metro California (my only consistent geographical reference cluster). Now it's more usually "of European descent" or straight-up "white," rarely "White" (the last as a companion to "Black," but with attendant complexities not fully thought out by frequent users of those terms, IMO). "Caucasian" and "Oriental" overlap considerably in heyday, AFAIK, and when political correctness began to kick in, I used to wonder when someone would get around to referring to my "Occidental" heritage. People do use "Asian American" a lot during the past decade and this one, at least on the US West Coast--and perhaps you know, but though "Asian" tends to mean desi in the UK and Ireland, it tends to mean E/SE Asian in the US, almost to the exclusion of the Indian subcontinent. In the 1980s some Californians still said "India Indian" to distinguish it from unmarked Indian = Native American.

"African American" in the kneejerk-habit manner you describe reads to me in the US as "I am trying to avoid saying 'black' no matter what." And your example shows how it matters if one is trying to make constructive distinctions (as opposed to pejorative ones), since there are South Africans of many identities and skin tones.

Another can of worms: hyphenation versus inter-word spacing: African American, African-American. There's been a fair bit of critical work since the 1990s on what it may mean to identify someone or oneself as a hyphenate (and perhaps earlier but my radar wasn't set up for it before then). Some of it includes e.g. Japanese Canadians vs. Japanese-Canadians vs. Canadian Japanese.

Gosh, sorry for length. I was paying attention during the 1980s because people kept asking me, "What are you?" and I wanted to know how they conceptualized others.

[steepholm]

People do use "Asian American" a lot during the past decade and this one, at least on the US West Coast--and perhaps you know, but though "Asian" tends to mean desi in the UK and Ireland, it tends to mean E/SE Asian in the US, almost to the exclusion of the Indian subcontinent.

I did know this, but occasionally forget, and am surprised. Oddly, no one ever describes people from, say, Iraq as Asian.

I hadn't thought about the hyphenation issue - though I've seen similar debates around trans identities.

[thistleingrey]

*nods* Sometimes I want to refer to someone as "West Asian" (e.g. a Tajik) or "Northeast Asian," but I haven't quite scraped up the conversational courage. Then too, pale-skinned Russians living east of Yekaterinburg or Novosibirsk: Asian or not? Most people I know would say not, which is the complementary part of how "Asian" tends to be the notional grandchild-successor label of "Mongloid" in the US, at least, with "Oriental" between them. Do you happen to know whether "Asian"-for-desi usage in the UK is mostly C20/21 or whether it's earlier? It startled me once to hear an English person [ETA oh dear, by which I mean apparent ethnicity, not "English" by nationality] refer to a desi person as "black," but that's why I wonder whether "Asian" has become the politer replacement term.

[cmcmck]

An Australian friend informs me that with my Romani and Jewish ancestry, I'd have been designated 'black' under the 'white Australia policy' of some time back.

As you can see in the userpic, I'm of the Morticia Addams skin tone!

This is perhaps a good example of just how ridiculous attempts at racial stereotyping really are. :o)

[thistleingrey]

Mm, good point--the policy under which anything not "white" is "black."

[steepholm]

I seem to remember reading the Stalin described himself as "Asiatic" (I've no idea what the Russian word would have been) when greeting some other Asian leader - possibly Mao.

"Black" was regularly used for Indians into the mid-C20th - you'll find it in The Secret Garden for example - but I don't think its widespread use much outlived the Raj. I certainly don't remember hearing it of immigrant Asian populations in Britain, where "black" tends to be used exclusively of people from African and Afro-Caribbean populations. I suspect that using "Asian"-for-desi came about at the same time, as a general non-pejorative term for immigrants from the sub-Continent. (Mind, in terms of skin colour, some Dravidians are as dark as some sub-Saharan Africans, and the original "Little Black Sambo" was, iirc, a Tamil boy.)

[thistleingrey]

Thanks for this! And I had forgotten about Burnett.