Black and African American

The terms Black and African American are the products of twentieth-century political and cultural movements that struggled to find terms to define, unite, celebrate, and recognize the heritage and identity of people of African descent in the United States. Today, African American typically refers to the ethnicity, nationality, and culture of Black people residing in or born in the United States. Black typically refers to a racial category and an elastic cultural, ethnic, and, arguably, political identity that is not defined by nationality or geopolitical boundaries. These two terms are only the most recent articulations of a long tradition of collective self-identification that began during the earliest days of slavery and colonialism in the Americas. This essay examines the social and political shifts that engendered new ways of naming Black identity and the names and terminology intellectuals have used to describe people of African descent in the Americas in the past.