Comment by vidarh
1 year ago
There's an implicit assumption in it, that while I think it might well not have been trying to be offensive can be seen to suggests a black person in the UK would be African.
Not only do many of them not see themselves as such because they're born here, and their parents and grandparents might be British and/or born here (my son is mixed, his grandfather on his mothers side was Nigerian and British and born here; he is third generation British by some measure - his mother was born in Nigeria, but holds British citizenship due to her father; if he decides to consider himself African or Nigerian - he has a Nigerian citizenship - that's up to him, but he's born here, to a mother with a British citizenship, and has never set foot in any part of Africa), but another significant proportion of black people here consider themselves Caribbean rather than African, because their ancestry goes back many generations in the Caribbean, and that's where they or their recent ancestors immigrated from.
Here, "forcing" a categorization of "African" on someone will be seen by at least some people as implying they're immigrants, and even when that is actually the case, having the label forced on you is often a prelude to racist sentiments.
That all makes sense, but in this case I didn't read any ill intent. All I read was an American asking a categorization question. The immigration status was not relevant to 'African British'. It was simply a byproduct of 1990s/2000s culture where, in the US, "black" was not a term you could use without inferring racism. Rather folks were taught to use "African American" to mitigate racisim claims.
The other comment from hot_gil sums it up well,
"""
I promise it's not because we think of people outside the US as American. When I was a kid in the 2000s, we were told never to say "black" and to say "African-American" instead. There was no PC term in the US to refer to black people who are not American. This has started to change lately, but it's still iffy.
"""
There has been very vocal pressure to understand "lived experiences". This, to me, qualifies exactly as that and is purely a misinterpretation of the author's intent.
I figured that might be the case, and why I tried to thread softly with the first line of my reply. In Europe in general, the "where are you really from?" line of questioning is one most non-white (and quite a lot of white) people will run into, and while it is often used to obscure racism, anti-immigrant sentiment a bigger part of the discussion because it is often the "first layer" of a package that will turn out to include racism once you've peeled back the anti-immigration (not always - there are people who have anti-immigrant views who are not racist - the link, I think, rather goes the other direction: most of the racists are also anti-immigrant and uses it as a marginally more 'acceptable' shield against accusations of racism)
Hence for many people it becomes important to de-emphasize "another location" in how they identify that might imply they somehow don't belong. While for others holding on to a culture that is often a lot closer matters.
And so the discourse around labels is very different.
Thank you for the insight. It's really interesting to see the Euro perspective. Moreso considering how I would believe immigration is more common after the establishment of the EU. But I suppose you do have relatively recent major conflicts which may cause resistance to outsiders.
As an aside, I once was considering trying to spend some working years in Scandinavia but read that it was likely I would always be kept at an arm's length by the locals since I was non native, regardless of my fluency in the language. As an American, I found it odd considering how heterogenous my social circle was. Maybe totally false or not applicable to urban centers, but I read it from various sources, and it was persuasive enough for me to switch focus to mainland Europe.
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