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huh? my parents are haitian and i was born here in brooklyn , NY i am 75 percent black sir.
Do you speak creole? Do you have any sort of ties to Haiti other than your parents being from there? Have you ever been out of the US?
If your answer to all of these questions is no, I would sooner call you African American. Other than half of my family being Nigerian, I was never raised to be traditionally Igbo... I don't speak Igbo and have no real ties to Nigeria other than being half Nigerian. Am I really Nigerian in the full sense of the word? No. I have no idea what it would be like to actually live in Nigeria other than the couple of stories that I've heard about it... it would be like me claiming to be a New Yorker if my family was from New York but I had lived all my life in the bay.
Do you speak creole? Do you have any sort of ties to Haiti other than your parents being from there? Have you ever been out of the US?
If your answer to all of these questions is no, I would sooner call you African American. Other than half of my family being Nigerian, I was never raised to be traditionally Igbo... I don't speak Igbo and have no real ties to Nigeria other than being half Nigerian. Am I really Nigerian in the full sense of the word? No. I have no idea what it would be like to actually live in Nigeria other than the couple of stories that I've heard about it... it would be like me claiming to be a New Yorker if my family was from New York but I had lived all my life in the bay.
yes i speak creole(i speak it but with a awful dialect).
yes i have ties to haiti since all of my family is Haitian , and i still have family living in haiti.
i have been outside of the U.S mainly to the bahamas(which feels like haiti at times), and canada(montreal - haitian city lol). And i am going to Switzerland this summer to visit even more of my Haitian family.
well obviously thats the reason you are quick to call yourself black , idk how you do it in the bay , but here in nyc i rarely meet a full nigerian or african from africa call themselves african american. now when they speak about race off coarse they say "I'm black" but before that they will be quick to say "I'm nigerian"
thats what i have experienced with most west indians, and africans here in nyc.
I have an interesting question for both of you guys:
What does it mean to technically be "raised" somewhere? Say you were born in like Virginia or something, and you lived there until you were about 15-16 years old, and then move to like California or something, are you still technically "born and raised in VA" even though you are now 17 years old and living in Cali?
actually no you still make no sense, your argument has nothing to do with the term african american.
first you clearly said african american meant your background was african in the bay meaning your parents, now you give me a so called history lesson huh?
secondly i know where blacks came from i was just separating and showing the difference between afro - americans , and blacks from africa.
so like i said people from africa in this present day go by their ethnicity nigerian , ethiopian etc.
the term african american is mainly for blacks who are from the south who have been here for hundreds of years comining from africa.
pretentious ass bay areas.
You obviously didn't understand the point I was making. Try again.
If you're asian and your kids are born here then your kids are asian-american... if you're latino and your kids are born here then your kids are latino-american. If you're African and your kids are born here then they'd be African-American. If you choose to go by what country you're from then you'd say nigerian american/ethiopian american/somalian american etc. But otherwise, African American is the actual term.
Going by the US Census...
"Black or African American. A person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as 'Black, African Am., or Negro,' or provide written entries such as African American, Afro American, Kenyan, Nigerian, or Haitian."
While the term african american may be associated more closely with enslaved africans in america and their descendants, it literally means that you're of african descent but you were born in America.
Location: Austin, TX/Chicago, IL/Houston, TX/Washington, DC
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Quote:
Originally Posted by clean_polo
I have an interesting question for both of you guys:
What does it mean to technically be "raised" somewhere? Say you were born in like Virginia or something, and you lived there until you were about 15-16 years old, and then move to like California or something, are you still technically "born and raised in VA" even though you are now 17 years old and living in Cali?
Yes, you still spent much of your childhood/adolescent years (Period of time a person is "raised") in Virginia and not California.
yes i speak creole(i speak it but with a awful dialect).
yes i have ties to haiti since all of my family is Haitian , and i still have family living in haiti.
i have been outside of the U.S mainly to the bahamas(which feels like haiti at times), and canada(montreal - haitian city lol). And i am going to Switzerland this summer to visit even more of my Haitian family.
well obviously thats the reason you are quick to call yourself black , idk how you do it in the bay , but here in nyc i rarely meet a full nigerian or african from africa call themselves african american. now when they speak about race off coarse they say "I'm black" but before that they will be quick to say "I'm nigerian"
thats what i have experienced with most west indians, and africans here in nyc.
I mean, I have ties & family in Nigeria (a ****load of family in fact... polygamy's a ***** lol) and my perspective's obviously different than someone who's parents are from here because one of my parents is an immigrant, but I myself am not from Nigerian... I'm American born and raised. imo there's a difference between being Nigerian-American and being Nigerian, enough of a difference that it's in some ways more accurate to say African American because I likely have more in common with Ethiopian or Ghanaian or South African-Americans or any other 1st generation African Americans who've lived here all their lives than I do with someone who lived all their life in Nigeria.
And maybe it has a lot to do with the fact that on the other side of my family I'm from Arkansas but... yea.
I have an interesting question for both of you guys:
What does it mean to technically be "raised" somewhere? Say you were born in like Virginia or something, and you lived there until you were about 15-16 years old, and then move to like California or something, are you still technically "born and raised in VA" even though you are now 17 years old and living in Cali?
Yup... the 1st 20 years of your life are the most developmental... if you lived the first 16 out of the 20 years in one place, then you're definitely from that place whether you want to be or not...
well obviously thats the reason you are quick to call yourself black , idk how you do it in the bay , but here in nyc i rarely meet a full nigerian or african from africa call themselves african american. now when they speak about race off coarse they say "I'm black" but before that they will be quick to say "I'm nigerian"
Largely it has to do with the fact that there aren't too many blacks in the bay... we make up like 6% of the population. Blacks are all lumped together... obviously I'll say that I'm Nigerian if someone asks where my family's from but other than that... I'd definitely call myself african american.
huh? my parents are haitian and i was born here in brooklyn , NY i am 75 percent black sir.
Anyway, what's Brooklyn like? the people I know from NY often compare Oakland to Brooklyn... not in terms of looks or anything but because Brooklyn acts as the more diverse and more laid back borrough in regards to Manhattan, which is similar to how Oakland acts in regards to SF.
I had an uncle that used to live in Brooklyn (Flatbush) that I visited when I was 4 but I have no memory of it so
Oakland's an interesting place tho... imo its the best kept secret in the bay. I only moved up here recently from the south bay but I like it a lot...
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