What It Means To Be Black In America Research Paper

Prior to viewing the series, I have always felt like race was a social construct that really didn’t represent the diverse civilizations on earth. Anyone who see me would assumes my race is Black however to me race is general terms for my ethnicity. Having been brought up in an Nigerian household I never really completely related to my Black American friends. This really made me question was I truly Black and if so are there different types of Blacks. Racial terms like Black, White, Hispanic, and Asian fail to convey the disparate cultures that their are in the world. Instead the pigeon hole people of a specific skin color by classifying them

Everyone is raised within a culture with a set of customs and morals handed down by those generations before them. Most individual’s view and experience identity in different ways. During history, different ethnic groups have struggled with finding their place within society. In the mid-nineteen hundreds, African Americans faced a great deal of political and social discrimination based on the tone of their skin. After the Civil Rights Movement, many African Americans no longer wanted to be identified by their African American lifestyle, so they began to practice African culture by taking on African hairdos, African-influenced clothing, and adopting African names. By turning away from their roots, many African Americans embraced a

Furthermore, I believe the labels for adults of color should be cared more. I believe that adults of color should care more about labeling because the terms African American and Black are different. I think that African American label in America should be used for people that have influence in Africa or just immigrated to America. The label of African American is being stressed from its original intent. McWhorter stresses the point that people of color are not African to any significant extent. He explains, “It carries an air of protest, a reminder that our ancestors were brought here against their will…and that we have come a long way since then” (528). From a stand point, I think that that using the label “African American” is being stressed out too much because using the term African has no significance on the Black society today. The label Black should be used for people that have influence in America. For a person of color being Black, I think that it would be an appropriate term for the Black society of the present age. I feel it is not perfect but one step of improvement versus the previous labels in the past. It

Everyone is raised within a culture with a set of customs and morals handed down by those generations before them. Most individual’s view and experience identity in different ways. During history, different ethnic groups have struggled with finding their place within society. In the mid-nineteen hundreds, African Americans faced a great deal of political and social discrimination based on the tone of their skin. After the Civil Rights Movement, many African Americans no longer wanted to be identified by their African American lifestyle, so they began to practice African culture by taking on African hairdos, African-influenced clothing, and adopting African names. By turning away from their roots, many African Americans embraced a culture that was not inherited, thus putting behind the unique and significant characteristics

Personally, I am all over it on consumers creating their own media because media outlets have purposefully ignored and neglected minorities. For example, I wasn’t well aware of the struggles black Americans have endured or continuing to in America. It was through social media sites like Twitter, Tumblr or YouTube that I truly learned about what it means to be black in America. I learned about police brutality, sexism towards black women, the hyper-sexualization of the black body and all types of racism/sexism because of people taking media into their own hands. It truly sheds a light on issues I have not know about or experience and I am grateful for that.

In the essay “What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture?” he says that popular culture is not “the arena where we find out who we really are.” Instead, it is “where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to the audiences out there who do not get the message, but to ourselves for the very first time. “Black” signifies: A community in which experiences, pleasures, memories, and everyday practices of black people occur. Historical perseverance of black people in the diaspora. An aesthetic of distinctive cultural selections out of which popular depictions were made. And of the black counter narratives we have struggled to voice.

African Americans expressed in other people’s view might seen as poor, useless, powerless, not belonging and so much more. But

Talking Black In America addresses how advanced, unique, and culturally important African American English is (Hutcheson and Cullinan, 2017).

To other people, the average black man is simple. Very athletic, not too bright, but very street smart. But in all actuality, an African American male is much more than what meets the eye. There are many obvious traits that pertain to being classified as an African American man such as, skin tone and lineage. Those are very broad characteristics though, there are many different black men and they are all special.

This presented a big problem to those making decisions at various institutions. In fact, the most recent case is where the United States Army stopped using the term Negro in any of its official documents and other institutions proposed that the terms ‘African American’ and ‘black’ can be used interchangeably. The truth is that the blacks are viewed differently from the blacks. The blacks are viewed more negative than the African Americans due to the difference in economic and social classes. Hence, the blacks can be viewed as having colder characters and are less competent.

Black culture is intersectional. What people think is black is heavily dependent on their education level, age, and family

How do we define black people? Some might say that they are simply people with a different skin colour. Others may claim that black people are inferior to white people, and that black people should be subservient to white people. The definition of ‘black’ is the topic of William Raspberry’s article. He discusses how we define ‘black’ and how definitions don’t just negatively affect black people, but also how definitions in general negatively affect people.

What defines who we are: is it where we come from, who our parents are, how much money we have, what we look like, or is it what we do with our lives? The truth is, the answer to this question is very complex, and there is no one true answer, but when looking from the eyes of America one of the major contributing factors to this is race. In the world that we live, being black has become known as something negative, and being white is become what the world looks at as the beauty, intelligence, and the beginning of humanity. This thought is known as white supremacy. There are many contributing factors to this statement such as, slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the newest of them all, colorism. All the events of the past play a role in how our society interacts and how blacks interact with each other. Over time the development of the term Colorism has developed unknowingly in the psyche of the colored people of the world, but in order to understand why people feel this way about their self you have to know all the components that go into it.

According to that definition a  person is considered to be black if the person has one drop of an blood, seeing what is going on in the world today, people with dark skin color are treated unfairly compared to other people who consider themselves to be black based on the one based on the one drop rule. Personally I believe it’s more suitable to class people with mixed race as biracial. In the sense not everybody can be  consider to be  black,  it all depends on these physical features and most importantly  how society views them.being called an  African, American emphasis more on a person's a social and cultural group. So I don't consider being an African America as a race, but rather as a person ethnicity, like where they are from  people is

“The term African American refers to individuals who are residents of the U.S.A., usually raised here, who are of African ancestry, whereas the term Black is more general and can refer to anyone of African ancestry, including recent immigrant” (Education.byu.edu, 2012). African Americans make up about 14% of the population in