"African-American" vs. "black" at the Olympics

[Wilson Gray]

Damn it, Larry! You're right, again! ;-)

-Wilson

On 3/9/06, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "African-American" vs. "black" at the Olympics
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 10:10 PM -0500 3/9/06, Wilson Gray wrote:
> >  > >> From King Kaufman's sports column on Salon:
> >>  >>
> >>  >> -----
> >>  >>
> >>  >>
> >>
> >>
> http://www.salon.com/sports/col/kaufman/2006/03/07/tuesday/index1.html#olympics
> >>  >>
> >>  >> Two weeks ago I wrote about NBC giving American speed skater Shani
> >>  >> Davis short shrift by calling him "the first African-American" to
> win
> >>  >> an individual gold medal at the Winter Olympics when he was in fact
> >>  >> the first black person of any nationality to do so.
> >>  >>
> >>  >>
> >
> >
> >True, but had he not been American, I, for one, wouldn't have cared.
> >
> >-Wilson
> >
> What's interesting about this to me is that each of the two possible
> observations--
>
> Shani Davis is the first black (person) to win an individual gold
> medal at the Winter Olympics.
> Shani Davis is the first African-American to win an individual gold
> medal at the Winter Olympics.
>
> --is informative in a way the other isn't, at least if the
> hearer/reader was not already aware of S.D.'s nationality.   That is,
> neither entails the other.
>
> Larry
>
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