On the non-utility of "African-American"

[Alice Faber]

Wilson Gray wrote:
> An article in last week's Sports Illustrated noted that a certain
> ice-hockey player was the first "African-American" to hold some record
> or other for performance. (As readers can tell, I'm not a particular
> fan of this sport.) A letter to the editor published in this week's SI
> pointed out that, given that the player cited was born and reared in
> Calgary, it would have been more appropriate to refer to him as an
> "African-Canadian," even though a complete genealogy might show that
> he was ultimately descended from escaped African-American slaves.

OK...I'm a fairly intense hockey fan (intense enough to actually have
read biographical articles and other features on players with unusual
backgrounds). There are few enough players of color (I hate that kind of
locution normally, but it will serve well enough here). While there are
indeed some whose families have been in Canada long enough that it's
immaterial in some sense how they got there (escaped/freed slaves,
direct from the islands in the colonial period, etc.), that's not the
majority of such players by any means. I can think of two Americans (who
therefore can refer to themselves as African-American without any
confusion). There are a fair number of players with one parent who's an
African native. Without checking, I suspect that the subject of the
story in SI is one such African-Canadian (father Nigerian, mother
Canadian), but there's another player of mixed Kenyan-Swedish ancestry.
But, mostly you have Canadians of Barbadian ancestry who, when they get
to the NHL, if they play for a US team, have to come to grips with being
called African-American, when neither side of the hyphen matches their
self-image. A number of years ago, I read a feature on Anson Carter (one
of these Barbadian-Canadians) when he was playing in New York in which
he was quoted on how odd it felt to be called African-American.

I'm gonna stop now, because I *know* I can go on and on and on about hockey.

--
 =============================================================================
Alice Faber
faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                                  tel: (203)
865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA                                     fax (203)
865-8963

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org