Wikipedia Unsure Whether African-American Should Be A A, A-A, A-a

Benjamin Zimmer bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU
Tue Oct 21 16:03:34 UTC 2008


On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 11:50 AM, Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> I saw only one segment on it on the Daily Show (though there is a lot
> of hits on Google). What I took from it is that not being black enough
> was concerned with the fact that his father is an immigrant so Barack
> hadn't been through the black experience and had nothing to do with
> skin color. This relates to the issue of applied scope of the term
> African-American versus the term black. BB

I first came across this line of argument in a piece by Debra
Dickerson on Salon.com in Jan. '07:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/01/22/obama/

Response from Gary Kamiya here:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/01/23/race_in_america/


--Ben Zimmer

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