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	Workers Vanguard No. 1163	18 October 2019

Why Marxists Don’t Use “African American”

We print below a contribution, edited for publication, by comrade Dianna Faustine to the discussion leading up to the 15th National Conference of the Spartacist League/U.S. late last year. For more on the conference, see “In the Predominant Imperialist Power,” WV No. 1158 (26 July).

In the context of pre-conference discussion, I have been thinking about why we don’t use the term “African American.” For as long as I can remember, I was taught to use the term “African American,” even though my mom used “Negro” sometimes (only when talking to black family members). In public, the expectation was that I, especially when interacting with someone white, was to use “African American.”

The term “African American” is the antithesis of revolutionary integrationism and that’s why we don’t use it. While I did not find our use of the term in any of our press except in quotes or when referring to the name of a group or an academic department, I have not been able to find an explanation in anything we wrote. However, in a 2002 document written during a party discussion on the “N word,” a comrade explained: “Through ‘people of color’ politics, African American attempts to promote a kind of cultural solidarity of common heritage to replace and undermine the fact that blacks lost all familial, cultural and language ties to their ‘homeland’ when held hostage by a deathly cruel system of slavery” (emphasis in original).

Our use of “black” recognizes race as a social construct. It also recognizes black people as part of a race-color caste, who are both an integral part of American class society and forcibly segregated at the bottom, experiencing all the horrors that come along with being black in America. Our program of revolutionary integrationism calls for free quality health care, housing and education against “separate but equal.” It is the program whereby the multiracial working class, under the leadership of a revolutionary party and with black workers playing a vanguard role, will expropriate the capitalists and liberate black people and all the oppressed through the third American Revolution.

Although the term “African American” was made popular in the late ’80s/early ’90s by Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition to create an “ethnic identity,” its origin was thought to be in an abolitionist newspaper from 1835, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which added the term in 2001. But actually, the first occurrence seems to have been in 1782 in printed sermons where the author was listed anonymously as “the African American.” According to a New York Times article (20 April 2015), “‘Afro-American’ has been documented as early as 1831, with ‘black American’ (1818) and ‘Africo-American’ (1788) going back even further.”

According to a 1967 article in Ebony by its former senior editor Lerone Bennett Jr., organizations created by free blacks in the late 18th century often contained “African” in their names. But, in the early 19th century “when the American Colonization Society organized a movement to send free Africans ‘back’ to Africa,” the reaction was to then switch to using “colored,” which the NAACP did in 1909. He goes on to say that Philadelphia leaders (although it’s not clear who these “leaders” were) recommended using “Oppressed Americans,” which disappears the centrality of the black question; however, this was not widely adopted. Booker T. Washington pushed for using “Negro,” and it was used by W.E.B. Du Bois, although he also used “black.” Marcus Garvey, who preached that black people should go “back” to Africa, also used “Negro.” The use of an upper case “N” was pushed by the NAACP and by 1930 the New York Times declared it would start capitalizing the “N.”

As Phillip T. Gay, an associate professor of sociology at San Diego State University, wrote in a 1989 Los Angeles Times commentary entitled “A Vote Against Use of ‘African-American’”:

“The truth of the matter, then, is that the overwhelming majority of black Americans are, at the very least, six or seven generations culturally removed from Africa. They speak no African language.... They have no relatives in Africa, and they have never themselves been to Africa....

“A homeland is a place that one can return to. Most black Americans can’t return home to Africa, because they were never there in the first place, culturally or otherwise.... Blacks have now been in America for more than 350 years, as slaves and as workers in all occupations. They have fought in every American war.”

“African American” also does not account for current African immigrants who are truly immigrants but are considered black the minute they set foot in this country.

Amid the heightened radicalization of the 1960s, there was a backlash against the use of the word “Negro” (which had been first used in lower case by Portuguese and Spanish slave traders) as some considered it a “slavery-imposed name.” At that time “Negro” was looked down on as a derogatory word referring to “Uncle Toms,” and was associated with the nonviolent strategy of Martin Luther King Jr. “Black” was popularized by the Black Panther Party in the use of “Black Power” and, of course, in James Brown’s song “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” “Afro American” was also used around this time, particularly by Malcolm X. The Panthers’ use of the term “black” was supposed to imbue black people with pride and militancy, but had a black nationalist bent and was counter to our program of revolutionary integrationism.

We do not capitalize “black,” nor does the New York Times, albeit for different reasons. For some, capitalizing the “B” means a recognition of ethnicity and African heritage. Interestingly, the founders of the liberal Black Lives Matter organization, who claim to be influenced by both the Black Power movement and Pan-Africanism, use “Black.” For us, “black” is an identifier that denotes race-color caste oppression linked to slavery, which has resulted in the “one drop” rule.

In “Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom” (1966), a founding document of the Spartacist League, we use “black,” “Black,” and “Negro.” We state: “Black nationalism accepts present American class society and working-class divisions as unchanging and unchangeable, and from this static vantage point separation is seen as the only solution.” Black nationalism accepts race- and class-divided society as it is, whereas our program fights to uproot that society. Likewise, liberal integrationism concedes to the status quo by pushing the illusion that capitalist society can be reformed. As we said in “Revolutionary Marxists and the Fight for Black Freedom,” WV No. 930 (13 February 2009): “Equality can be achieved only through the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a planned socialist economy under a multiracial workers government. This is the crux of revolutionary integrationism.”