Talk:African Americans

Skip to table of contents

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the African Americans article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27: 60 days

This article is written in American English, which has its own spelling conventions (color, defense, traveled) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

African diaspora Top‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject African diaspora, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of African diaspora on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.African diasporaWikipedia:WikiProject African diasporaTemplate:WikiProject African diasporaAfrican diaspora articles
Top	This article has been rated as Top-importance on the project's importance scale.

Civil Rights Movement Top‑importance

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Civil Rights Movement, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Civil Rights Movement on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Civil Rights MovementWikipedia:WikiProject Civil Rights MovementTemplate:WikiProject Civil Rights MovementCivil Rights Movement articles

Top

This article has been rated as Top-importance on the importance scale.

To-do list for African Americans:

No to-do list assigned.

WikiProject Civil Rights Movement to do list:

Edit the tasks list

Here are some tasks awaiting attention:

Article requests : All redlinked articles listed at User:Mitchumch/Movement templates#Civil Rights Movement need to be created.
Durham movement (North Carolina)
Greensboro movement (North Carolina) (currently a redirect)
Henry Hezekiah Dee (currently a redirect)
Delano Herman Middleton (currently a redirect)
Charles Eddie Moore (currently a redirect)
Henry Ezekial Smith (currently a redirect)
Cleanup : Rosa Parks, and upgrade to GA status
Black Arts Movement
Collaborate : Tagging all relevant articles with project template.
Expand : And the Walls Came Tumbling Down
Medgar Evers
The Children (Halberstam)
Cambridge movement (civil rights)
Browder v. Gayle
Strom Thurmond filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1957
Photo : Milton Galamison • J. Charles Jones • Gloria Richardson • Richard Durham • Freedom Riders • Freedom Summer • March Against Fear • Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom • Youth March for Integrated Schools (1958) • Youth March for Integrated Schools (1959) • Birmingham riot of 1963 • 16th Street Baptist Church bombing (image of bombing) • Bloody Tuesday (1964) • Biloxi wade-ins (image of wade-ins) • Tallahassee bus boycott • Tent City (Tennessee) • Memphis sanitation strike (image of actual strike) • Americus movement • Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple bombing • Baton Rouge bus boycott • Orangeburg massacre • Mansfield school desegregation incident • Bloody Monday (Danville)

Ethnic groups Top‑importance

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Ethnic groups, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of articles relating to ethnic groups, nationalities, and other cultural identities on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Ethnic groupsWikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic groupsTemplate:WikiProject Ethnic groupsEthnic groups articles

Top

This article has been rated as Top-importance on the project's importance scale.

WikiProject Ethnic groups open tasks:

Here are some open WikiProject Ethnic groups tasks:

Meta-tasks:
- Place the {{Ethnic groups}} template on the talk page of articles within the scope of this project.
- Resolve the disparity in importance rankings among different ethnic groups
Articles about ethnic groups that currently have issues needing resolution:
Start an article:
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic groups/Article requests

Feel free to edit this list or discuss these tasks.

United States Top‑importance

	United States portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject United States, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of topics relating to the United States of America on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the ongoing discussions. Template Usage Articles Requested! Become a Member Project Talk Alerts United StatesWikipedia:WikiProject United StatesTemplate:WikiProject United StatesUnited States articles
Top	This article has been rated as Top-importance on the project's importance scale.

Previous discussions concerning the infobox in the top right corner of the article can be found at Talk:African Americans/summary.

Semi-protected edit request on 29 September 2024

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

Hispanic or Latino group is 18.7% while African-Americans or Blacks are 12.1% according to the 2020 census. 96.246.86.51 (talk) 03:49, 29 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

African-Americans or Blacks as the 2nd largest ethnic group in the U.S. is categorically and emphatically incorrect. Please correct.

Not done: I understand your confusion, however African-Americans are a specific, singular ethno-racial group as measured by the US census, whereas "Hispanic or Latino" is an umbrella category used to measure a multiplicity of ethnicities and races that fall under it. I hope this clears some things up. Glass Snow (talk) 09:01, 29 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Last sentence of lede (again)

The end of the lede currently reads:

The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States.^[1]^[2]

There was previously a citation to a source from Martin & Fabes that specified that African-Americans had to be descendants of people enslaved specifically within the United States, but I WP:BOLDly removed that source as Martin & Fabes is an introductory child development textbook, and neither of the authors claim to be experts in racial identity or anything remotely related to being a reliable source for the term "African American" (both are white psychologists, one specialized in gender identity, the other in children's relationships). I moved up another source from later in the article that talks about the introduction of the phrase, but neither it nor the remaining Locke and Bailey source specify that the ancestors have to have been enslaved within the United States. Therefore, I am proposing changing the sentence to:

The term "African American" generally denotes American descendants of those taken from Africa as part of the Atlantic slave trade.^[1]^[2]

Since this sentence has been the subject of a few discussions here in the past, I wanted to bring this to the talk page first.

References

^ ^a ^b Locke, Don C.; Bailey, Deryl F. (2013). Increasing Multicultural Understanding. SAGE Publications. p. 106. ISBN 978-1483314211. Archived from the original on August 18, 2018. Retrieved March 7, 2018. African American refers to descendants of enslaved Black people who are from the United States. The reason we use an entire continent (Africa) instead of a country (e.g., Irish American) is because slave masters purposefully obliterated tribal ancestry, language, and family units in order to destroy the spirit of the people they enslaved, thereby making it impossible for their descendants to trace their history prior to being born into slavery.
^ ^a ^b Wilkerson, Isabel (January 31, 1989). "'African-American' Favored By Many of America's Blacks". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved December 28, 2020. A movement led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson to call blacks African-Americans has met with both rousing approval and deep-seated skepticism in a debate that is coming to symbolize the role and history of blacks in this country. ... The question of a name has caused pain and controversy since the first Africans were captured and shipped to the Americas in the 17th century. The slaves called themselves Africans at first, but slave masters gave them English names and called them Negroes, the Portuguese word for black, historians say. That term was resented by some blacks who said it was degrading when whites mispronounced it, accidentally or intentionally.

--Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 15:30, 1 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Please add back Louisiana Creole French Under Languages

I noticed it has been removed without explanation and as an LA Creole myself this is an important aspect of AA Heritage and culture that has been wiped from the page. it has been there for a decade and was only removed this year. 66.163.89.16 (talk) 21:52, 2 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

According to the Wiki, there are only 77 thousand native speakers.

Even if all of them are African American (which is highly unlikely) it would constitute a very tiny minority of African Americans. It's removal probably has to do with that.

Inclusions of such minorities of <0.1% for a language, amongst other topics, would clutter the article. Gelbom (talk) 02:17, 3 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It was only listed under the languages tab on the side, so the argument of it cluttering the article makes no sense. Also, a Louisiana Creole cuisine is a language of African-American people from people that are of Louisiana Creole Heritage. It seems like you are not very educated on this topic respectfully, but I don’t expect many people to really know about our history as LA Creoles. My reason for saying this was a lack of understanding made apparent to me in your first few sentences when you say you doubt that All of these speakers are African-American, when it is quite literally language of that group, a specific cultural heritage within African-American people. It’s a part of the diversity of AA people based on regional heritage and history.

By the same logic you’ve used, Gullah Geechee should be removed as well because it’s an incredibly tiny fraction of African-American people based on regional cultural heritage, but it still is a part of it which is why it’s listed. This is why they both were listed side-by-side until February of this year. Again is erasure of the diversity of African-American people. 65.43.209.212 (talk) 03:17, 3 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

My bad. I got redirected to Louisiana French. This language has only 10,000 speakers according to wiki. Which would probably mean there are over 100 languages with more speakers in the African American community.

Unless African American is to mean those largely decendant from United States black slaves imported to the US over 150 years ago, it might reduce speakers above 10k to 50 langauges. That is still a long list.

I suppose however that the language having it's genesis among American blacks does merit its mention however. So I suppose I am inclined to support your decision.

(Also according to the wiki lede, it has other racial groups speaking it. This seems like a shoehorn but I'm inclined to believe not everyone of these 10k people are black.) Gelbom (talk) 21:38, 6 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki Education assignment: Black American Music F24

This article is currently the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 26 August 2024 and 9 December 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Mensahrunit, Erobertsonn (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by JsWai (talk) 19:18, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Change title to Black Americans?

Since this post is talking about Black Americans, to the exclusion of North Africans, should the title not be Black Americans? Captchacatcher (talk) 18:33, 19 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

WP:COMMONNAME applies. African American is far more popular than Black American based on this Ngrams search. SKAG123 (talk) 05:13, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Francisco Menéndez, Fort Mose

The Hispanic model of identity and representation has been historically characterized by its multi-faceted nature, which transcends strict racial categorizations. Numerous figures exemplify this complexity, including San Martín de Porres, Beatriz de Palacios, Spanish conquistador Juan Garrido that established the first commercial wheat farm in the Americas,^[1] Estevanico, Francisco Menendez in Florida, Juan de Villanueva, Juan Valiente, Juan Beltrán, Pedro Fulupo, Juan Bardales, Antonio Pérez, Gómez de León, Leonor Galiano, Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo and Juan García. Additionally, Juan Latino stands out as a significant figure in this discourse; he is recognized as the first black African to attend a European university, ultimately achieving the status of professor. This highlights the notion that the Hispanic identity is not monolithic and is instead enriched by diverse contributions across racial and ethnic lines. Such examples serve to challenge simplistic perceptions of race within the historical narrative of Hispanic culture. 31.164.184.21 (talk) 18:47, 5 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This article title is dumb

The article should be about all Americans of sub-saharan ancestry not just the native black population. Whether the article is about all blacks or just natives is unclear the whole time when you read through it. Idiocy 2603:8001:BA00:23BC:315A:3095:4741:7284 (talk) 06:38, 8 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

^ "Review | February 2012: 1493 by Charles Mann '76 | Amherst College". www.amherst.edu. Retrieved 2024-10-28.

[Locke-1] Locke, Don C.; Bailey, Deryl F. (2013). Increasing Multicultural Understanding. SAGE Publications. p. 106. ISBN 978-1483314211. Archived from the original on August 18, 2018. Retrieved March 7, 2018. African American refers to descendants of enslaved Black people who are from the United States. The reason we use an entire continent (Africa) instead of a country (e.g., Irish American) is because slave masters purposefully obliterated tribal ancestry, language, and family units in order to destroy the spirit of the people they enslaved, thereby making it impossible for their descendants to trace their history prior to being born into slavery.

[wilkersonnyt-2] Wilkerson, Isabel (January 31, 1989). "'African-American' Favored By Many of America's Blacks". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved December 28, 2020. A movement led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson to call blacks African-Americans has met with both rousing approval and deep-seated skepticism in a debate that is coming to symbolize the role and history of blacks in this country. ... The question of a name has caused pain and controversy since the first Africans were captured and shipped to the Americas in the 17th century. The slaves called themselves Africans at first, but slave masters gave them English names and called them Negroes, the Portuguese word for black, historians say. That term was resented by some blacks who said it was degrading when whites mispronounced it, accidentally or intentionally.

[3] "Review | February 2012: 1493 by Charles Mann '76 | Amherst College". www.amherst.edu. Retrieved 2024-10-28.

[1]

[2]

[1]