I would rather be called Black. My family’s story is a story of America, and I want the language used to describe me to reflect that.
I understand the ancestral connection to Africa. I can look at a DNA test and recognize what it tells me about origins. Yet I do not have family stories about life in Africa. I do not have a recent personal connection to a country there. The history I know, the history that explains who I am, is rooted in Alabama and the American South.
By my understanding of my family’s history, that separation stretches back more than two centuries. Generations have lived and died here. Their experiences were shaped by what happened in this country, under its laws, in its communities. When I say I am American, I am describing where my people’s lives unfolded.
White Americans with distant European ancestry are routinely understood as American. Their family origins do not require them to feel that another continent is home. I want the same consideration. Why should my American identity require a geographical qualification that I do not personally feel?
There is room for someone else to prefer African American. I am speaking for myself and making a case for those who share this understanding of their history. We should be able to name our identity without having to defend our affection for our own country or prove our loyalty to somewhere else.
For me, Alabama is a starting point. For other Black American families, the story runs through the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, or another part of the South. These places hold family histories. They are where people endured the conditions imposed on them and found ways to make lives anyway.
Our culture deserves to be understood in that setting. The foods we prepare, the expressions we use, and the customs we pass down have had generations to develop here. Some carry influences from elsewhere. Those influences do not make the culture any less our own. People adapted what they inherited to the circumstances they faced, and their descendants continued shaping it.
I do not need to trace every expression or every meal to another continent before I can value it. Its place in our lives matters. So does the experience that gave it meaning. Too often, discussions of Black identity pass over the generations between an ancestral origin and the people living here today.
What troubles me about that habit is how easily our own history becomes secondary. Slavery is discussed as an explanation for how we arrived, while the lives our ancestors made here receive less attention. Reconstruction alone changed the meaning of citizenship and the relationship between the federal government and the states. Black Americans were part of that struggle over what freedom would mean in practice. [1]
Our place in this country also includes what we demanded of it. The civil rights movement forced the nation to confront exclusion from public life and unequal treatment. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in public accommodations and employment, among other areas. Its employment protections addressed race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. The reach of those protections extended beyond the Black community. [2]
People arriving here today enter a country changed by those battles. Recognizing that inheritance should be an ordinary part of understanding America. The freedoms available now did not simply appear. They came through political struggle, sustained organizing, and people willing to risk the consequences of challenging the system.
That is part of why I take pride in the Black American experience. When I think of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, I think of voices that our experience gave to the world. Their differences belong in the story too. We do not have to make our leaders agree with one another to recognize the significance of the questions they raised about dignity and freedom.
I want that history to stand on its own. The expectation that every Black person must understand belonging through a single global identity can obscure the differences that make our histories meaningful. Cooperation across countries can be valuable. It should allow people to bring their particular experiences with them.
Someone from Jamaica or Trinidad can describe a national identity without being expected to surrender it to a broader racial label. I want Black Americans to have comparable room to describe a distinct people and culture within our American nationality. My ancestral origins do not create a personal desire to live elsewhere. This is home.
The distinction matters especially when we discuss reparations. My position is that a remedy for slavery in the United States must center the descendants of the people enslaved here. The phrase American descendants of slavery, often shortened to ADOS, identifies the lineage at the heart of that argument. It directs attention to a particular history and the people connected to it.
Someone whose family arrived recently can experience racism in America. That injury deserves recognition and protection under the law. It does not, by itself, establish descent from people enslaved in this country. Shared experiences of racial discrimination cannot answer every question about a remedy for a specific historical wrong.
Family history matters more than a simple arrival date. Someone who immigrated recently could also have ancestors who were enslaved in the United States. The relevant question is the connection to the harm being addressed. I believe a serious reparations discussion must preserve that connection rather than treating Black people everywhere as interchangeable.
This is where the importance of distinguishing our identity becomes clear. If we cannot describe the people whose ancestors experienced a particular system, we make it harder to explain what was taken from them and why their descendants have a claim. Broad labels may be convenient, but convenience is a poor reason to lose the history.
I do not resent another person’s attachment to Africa. I expect my attachment to America to receive the same respect. Our histories can meet without becoming identical. We can work together while remaining clear about where our families came from and what shaped their lives.
The word Black is enough for me. It carries an American family story that I know and a history I am proud to claim. My people’s place here does not depend on anyone else deciding that we have finally earned the right to belong. Our story is already part of this country. I intend to tell it that way.
Source Notes
Personal statements and family history reflect the author’s account. The reparations discussion presents the author’s position rather than a determination of eligibility under any particular program.
1. National Park Service, History and Culture, Reconstruction Era National Historical Park. View source
2. National Archives, Civil Rights Act of 1964. View source
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