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African Americans, also known as Black Americans, formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an American racial or ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. [3] [4] African Americans constitute the second largest ethno-racial group in the US after White Americans. [5]
The United States has a racially and ethnically diverse population. [1] At the federal level, race and ethnicity have been categorized separately. The most recent United States census recognized five racial categories (White, Black, Native American/Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander), as well as people who belong to two or more of the racial categories.
Instead, the category shifted from "Black, African Am., or Negro" to "Black or African Am." on paper questionnaires and electronic instruments. [42] The identification of the term African American first occurred in the 2000 census, reflecting a long-standing history of offensive terminology since the censuses' inception.
Black is a racialized classification of people, usually a political and skin color-based category for specific populations with a mid- to dark brown complexion.Not all people considered "black" have dark skin; in certain countries, often in socially based systems of racial classification in the Western world, the term "black" is used to describe persons who are perceived as dark-skinned ...
[11]: 499 Malcolm X preferred Black to Negro, but also started using the term Afro-American after leaving the Nation of Islam. [12] Since the late 1960s, various other terms have been more widespread in popular usage. These include Black, Black African, Afro-American (in use from the late 1960s to 1990) and African American. [13]
Conceptual breakdown of black separatism. In his discussion of black nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the historian Wilson Jeremiah Moses observes that "black separatism, or self-containment, which in its extreme form advocated the perpetual physical separation of the races, usually referred only to a simple institutional separatism, or the desire to see black ...
African American slaves in Georgia, 1850. African Americans are the result of an amalgamation of many different countries, [33] cultures, tribes and religions during the 16th and 17th centuries, [34] broken down, [35] and rebuilt upon shared experiences [36] and blended into one group on the North American continent during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and are now called African American.
The Martinique-born French Frantz Fanon and African-American writers Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, and Ralph Ellison, among others, wrote that negative symbolisms surrounding the word "black" outnumber positive ones. They argued that the good vs. bad dualism associated with white and black unconsciously frame prejudiced colloquialisms.