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I'm in favor of saying "ethnically African." It says nothing about nationality. In the context of a statistical analysis, like the OkCupid analysis, it's compl

I'm in favor of saying "ethnically African." It says nothing about nationality. In the context of a statistical analysis, like the OkCupid analysis, it's completely correct to segment people by ethnicity and by nationality separately, and it makes a lot more sense in that context to say "Americans of African ethnicity." "African Americans" is an equivocal phrase in an analytical context because people use it to refer to ethnicity, when it actually refers to both nationality and ethnicity.

iamdave 12y ago
Yup 100%. You would not believe the amount of fire I got responding to the writings of another black writer who touched this topic: Ta-Nehisi Coates when I expressed the exact same point. I think the troubling aspect is the disconnect in the area you highlighted: necessity in context. Sadly there is so much demagogy taking place in the larger conversation of "race" that not even natural sciences like the study of statistics are safe from mindsets that want to rule conversation with politics over pragmatism. Nomenclature exists to easily quantify and reference, not necssiarily objectify.
vacri 12y ago
Ethnicity also includes culture - a black person in the US sharing the same phenotype as a black person in Africa is not ethnically African, no more than an English white is ethnically French. It's difficult in that there isn't a clean solution, otherwise it would already have been found.
- selimthegrim 12y ago
  Do people not say "of X extraction" anymore?
shawabawa3 12y ago
> I'm in favor of saying "ethnically African." It says nothing about nationality. It does however make assumptions about ethnicity. How about just saying what you mean and using "black" I have a friend who is ethnically African, and he's as white as it gets (ancestors from South Africa). I also have a friend who is black but not ethnically African (ancestors from Trinidad)

iamdave 12y ago

Yup 100%. You would not believe the amount of fire I got responding to the writings of another black writer who touched this topic: Ta-Nehisi Coates when I expressed the exact same point. I think the troubling aspect is the disconnect in the area you highlighted: necessity in context. Sadly there is so much demagogy taking place in the larger conversation of "race" that not even natural sciences like the study of statistics are safe from mindsets that want to rule conversation with politics over pragmatism. Nomenclature exists to easily quantify and reference, not necssiarily objectify.

vacri 12y ago

Ethnicity also includes culture - a black person in the US sharing the same phenotype as a black person in Africa is not ethnically African, no more than an English white is ethnically French. It's difficult in that there isn't a clean solution, otherwise it would already have been found.

selimthegrim 12y ago
Do people not say "of X extraction" anymore?

shawabawa3 12y ago

> I'm in favor of saying "ethnically African." It says nothing about nationality. It does however make assumptions about ethnicity. How about just saying what you mean and using "black" I have a friend who is ethnically African, and he's as white as it gets (ancestors from South Africa). I also have a friend who is black but not ethnically African (ancestors from Trinidad)