Word: africanization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...recent declaration by Reverend Jesse Jackson that Americans of African ancestry should henceforth be known as African-Americans adds a popular voice to a concept put forth by Black intellectuals for many years. This is a very serious matter because it involves the labeling of some 30 million North Americans (and millions in the Caribbean and Latin America) who can trace part of their ancestry back to Africa. In our search for a positive identity of our own choosing, we have gone from African, to Colored, to Negro, to Black (a protest term which demonstrated that we preferred to identify...
While the term African-American does represent an advance in the continual evolution toward a true identity for a people whose ancestors were forcibly brought to this hemisphere by Europeans, forcibly held in slave labor and forcibly mixed in racial composition, it may be imprecise, or equivocal at best...
Genetically, almost all of today's "Black Americans" are a racial mixture of African, Native American Indian and European bloodlines. Regardless of the surface color (phenotypy), we are a unique genetic creation of this hemisphere, and America is our only home. Perhaps the name Afrindeur-American would be more precise. Dr. S. Allen Counter Director, Harvard Foundation
...Karl Marx's world revolution, Vladimir Lenin's "proletarian internationalism," Nikita Khrushchev's sponsorship of "wars of national liberation" and Leonid Brezhnev's assertion of the right to use force to protect the "gains" of socialism. In an interview with TIME, Anatoli Gromyko, director of Moscow's Institute of African Studies admits, "We should not export revolution. The idea that a socialist revolution would spread around the world was a romantic view. The change in our thinking came because we were engulfed in our own problems...
...permitting open displays of xenophobia. But one Chinese foreign policy expert offered a pragmatic geopolitical explanation: "As of ten years ago, we changed our policy and normalized relations with the U.S.," he said. "Soon we will also normalize our relations with the U.S.S.R. So the relative importance of the African countries to China is diminishing." There is little in that view to reassure anyone worried about future anti-African resentment...