Not like “I went to school with one” but have had an actual friendship?
I’ve had a couple of conversations recently where people have confidently said things about the Black community that are ridiculously incorrect. The kind of shit where you can tell they grew up in a very white community and learned about Black history as a college freshman.
Disclaimer: I am white, but I grew up in a Black neighborhood. I was one of 3 white kids in my elementary school lol, including my brother.
We don’t have African Americans here, we have black people. We don’t call them African Americans because most black people in my country are not from Africa (we have a large Caribbean population) and they are not American.
Where are they from? I’ve only ever seen “black” to mean African (or descendants of enslsved Africans), South Indian, or Aborigine.
I did not know that! I just assumed any black people in the Caribbean were descendents of slaves.
I told a coworker this once and they went from saying African Americans to just loudly whisper the word black like it was a derogatory term.
Generally speaking, Black people prefer to be called Black. I’ve had a few discussions over the years and Black works best because it’s not some made up white guilt term (African-American), and is capitalized in the same way that a nationality would be (Italian, Filipino).
Anyone who casually refers to Black people as “African-American” would probably answer “no” to this question. But I worded it that way to exclude a horde of Europeans talking about their coworkers who emigrated from Africa. Black descendents of enslaved Africans have a unique culture, and that’s who I was asking about.
