Tuesday, August 31, 2004

African-American/ Africa-Born

I have been reading with interest recent articles on the problematic category "African American".

I agree that we need to acknowledge the diversity of those of African descent residing in the United States. But I also think it would be useful to explore the crisis of the "African" identification mark in Africa itself, particularly in countries with large settler populations such as Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.

In such contexts, the term "Africa-Born" is sometimes used to categorize those who have made Africa their home despite their racial heritage. It is clearly a controversial agenda, witness Idi Amin's deportation of Indian nationals or Zimbabwe's Mugabe crusade to rid his country of white farmers.


An excellent dramatization of this current identity question in Africa is the Zambian theatre group Born African - a three-man show incorporating the experiences of black, white and mixed Africans.

The New York Times article this Sunday, "African-American" becomes a term for debate, --apparently precipitated by the political aspirations of Barack Obama, an "African-American?" of Kenyan descent-- misses this key point:

This month, the debate spilled into public view when Alan Keyes, the black Republican challenger for the Senate seat in Illinois, questioned whether Mr. Obama, the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention, should claim an African-American identity.

"Barack Obama claims an African-American heritage," Mr. Keyes said on the ABC program "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos. "Barack Obama and I have the same race - that is, physical characteristics. We are not from the same heritage."

"My ancestors toiled in slavery in this country," Mr. Keyes said. "My consciousness, who I am as a person, has been shaped by my struggle, deeply emotional and deeply painful, with the reality of that heritage."

Some black Americans argue that black immigrants, like Mr. Kamus, and the children of immigrants, like Mr. Obama and Mr. Powell, are most certainly African-American. (Mr. Obama and Mr. Powell often use that term when describing themselves.) Yet some immigrants and their children prefer to be called African or Nigerian-American or Jamaican-American, depending on their countries of origin. Other people prefer the term black, which seems to include everyone, regardless of nationality.



The debate over who can be African-American is clearly tied to the affirmative action agenda which has always suffered from a poverty of logic. It seems that only recently a wider spectrum of Americans are noticing the problematics of getting ethnic/race-based funding to the "real Blacks."

The Barack Obama piece in the Times was preceded by an earlier piece on June 24 by Sara Rimer and Karen W. Arenson, entitled, "Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?" A friend forwarded me the article with the note, "uh-oh, they're on to us":


At the most recent reunion of Harvard University's black alumni, there was lots of pleased talk about the increase in the number of black students at Harvard.

But the celebratory mood was broken in one forum, when some speakers brought up the thorny issue of exactly who those black students were.

While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them -- perhaps as many as two-thirds -- were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.


Much of the article drew from a recent undergraduate thesis by Aisha Hayne on the breakdown of Harvard's Black community. Of course, none of us with African roots who had struggled to make sense of the college social scene in recent years was surprised. I can remember like yesterday the painful first Black Students Association meeting of my college career where everyone went around to introduce themselves. Who was truly Black, or what African-American studies Professor Skip Gates (note the white wife) has affectionately termed the "black indigenous middle-class "?

The first New York Times article left me feeling rather uncomfortable. Koranteng and I had a heated debate, his take was don't let the politics of this get to you. I said, watch out, this means that you will have requests for affirmative action-keyed information including more details for black ancestery. Indeed, the Harvard alumni magazine followup article to the NY Times piece quoted Haynie:

"Harvard could do a better job of recognizing the differences between black students. The tendency is to see it as 'a black face is a black face'" says Haynie. "On the admissions form, you could put down where your parents and grandparents were born. If you have two black applicants, one from the American South, the other from the Caribbeaan, the black American may have come a lot further than the Caribbean student."

Somehow I doubt this will happen at Harvard where Affirmative-Action is very close to getting the boot [Note President Larry Summers recent speech on more financial aid to increase economic diversity].

And don't think I'm not aware what a scam much of this affirmative action money is. My favorite is the Ford Foundation Fellowships for Minorities recently re-christened "Diversity Fellowships". Up until this year a friend who is a first generation college student of Cuban-Dominican ancestery was ineligible (only Puerto-Ricans, African-Americans, Native Americans and native Hawaiians). Meanwhile another friend with a prominent Haitian doctor for a father was cruising on multiple minority fellowships including a Ford.

I was discussing the ironies of the Ford Foundation criteria last week with a few friends, when one woman- of Jewish descent with parents born in Southern Africa pointed out that she was African-American strictly speaking. Everyone laughed and said of course she wasn't.

Yet her situation speaks to an even more hidden pattern of migration- white Africans. It seems to me that all of these roundabout ways to get away from racial terms- African American instead of Black, Coloured, Negro only returns us to the crux of the matter... Where does race end and African begin?




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