African American label an injustice for blacks

A lie does not become a truth, a wrong does not become a right and evil does not become good … just because it is used and accepted by the majority. America’s harsh racial history is attempted to be distorted, sanitized and revised because the majority insists on referring to black people by the meaningless and stereotypical identity, “African-American.”

First, when someone is identified by the name of a country – American, Canadian, German, Brazilian, Italian, Egyptian, Veitnamese, Mexican, etc. – there is a country by that name to point to on a map that has a common government, language and culture. There is no country of Africa. Repeat: there is not country of Africa. This deception and sanitization is currently on display locally at the WWII Museum in New Orleans, and will soon be front and center nationally at a museum to open in Washington, D.C.

New Orleans’ WWII Museum currently has an exhibit they call “African-Americans” in WWII. To identify someone as an American infers that person has all the rights, privileges, freedoms and protections of America and its government. Was that the case with black soldiers in the American military during WWII? Were the Black Tuskegee Airmen Americans? Could they vote? Could they eat in any restaurant or stay in any hotel? Were the black soldiers who were lynched in uniform denied voting and burial rights while serving in a harshly segregated military Americans? Identifying black soldiers as African-American is an attempt to distort and sanitize history. Furthermore, the term did not exist at the time. It was created in the late ‘60s as a Madison Avenue slogan to finally recognize the purchasing power of black people.

The real sin in using African-American is that it promotes racial segregation of black and brown people among themselves. Only brainwashed descendants of black slaves “salute” being identified as African-American. Black Americans of Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, Jamaica, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and many other nations accept being brown and black but reject and resent being identified as African-American. Look no further than our past brown-skinned governor who is of Indian descent. This segregation of what should be a cohesive social and political power is split by a name. Example: the question of why aren’t there more African-Americans playing Major League Baseball is stupid when you look at the hundreds of brown and black players on major league rosters. It just so happens that they are from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Cuba, etc.

Here is another stupidity. The U.S. Army recently removed the word Negro as a racial identity and instead substituted the word black. Negro means black in Spanish. Negro is English for black! They are synonymous!

Slaves were black. Homer Plessy was Negro. Lena Horne was Negro. Negro Leagues had black baseball players. HBCU means Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Negro and Malcom X was black. Stokely Carmichael preached black power and Huey Newton formed the Black Panther Party. James Brown sang, “I’m Black and I’m Proud.” Louis Stokes formed the Congressional Black Caucus. The NFL and the NBA have black players associations. Reject the majority’s modern day Jim Crow. Adopt the historical accuracy and linguistic correctness to refer to black people as black. African-American is the substitute for “colored.”