Can a White person be African American? Free Dating, Singles and Personals

Can a White person be African American? Posted: 8/19/2009 9:43:05 AM
This is where 'political correctness' and PC-group labels and such can get a bit confusing and misleading. Can a non-black person born in Africa be 'African-American'? I would say , yes and no. Yes, in the sense they literally ARE that, especially if born in a part of Africa. But no because in the popular usage of the term(s) 'African-American' it indicates Americans of black African ancestry who share all the collective experiences that that carries along with it (including slavery and the legacy of discrimination other Americans leveled against them for years & years, and so on). A white African (such as a Dutch Afrikaner ~ a people with a long legacy as racists in their own recent past) or even a north African Arab like an Egyptian or Tunisian, are really therefore NOT in the 'African-American' category, at least not in modern popular & demographic usage of the phrase. And yet...they are technically from a part of Africa... It's like the blanket term 'Latino' , usually used here to indicate anyone from the parts of the Americas called Latin America. But the problem with the term is there are all different races and ethnicities from those countries. South America especially has many European Latins such as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian (esp.Argentina & Brazil -- places where I myself have cousins who originated in the same town in Italy where my dad came here from). So , when someone says, 'blacks and Latinos are experiencing racial profiling', think about some well-known 'Latinos' such as Gisele Bundchen, Christian de la Fuente, Ricardo Montalban, Desi Arnaz, Cameron Diaz (half-Cuban), Gael Garcia Bernal, Emilio Estevez, etc; what kinds of 'profiling' would (or could) they really be subjected to in the US , by police or by whomever, when compared with that which has been experienced by black Americans??? Now, if one wishes to say, 'blacks, along with some mixed-race Mexicans & Puerto Ricans from inner city areas', for example, have experienced racial profiling, then they should just put it that way, instead of using that other term which is one of those questionable demographic / census terms (kind of like 'African-American' ) that can lead to a lot of other questions about what it really means or doesn't mean. Nonetheless though, these terms still have validity IMO because they do reflect for the people who carry them (just like any 'hyphenated-American' , which I myself am proudly one) a common shared group experience , heritage, traditions, linguistic background, etc.