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fubarobfusco comments on 2011 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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Moreover, there are plenty of black people in the world who are not African-American.
There's an infamous video from a few years back in which an American interviewer makes this mistake when talking to an Olympic athlete of British nationality and African ancestry. It becomes increasingly clear that the interviewer is merely doing a mental substitution of "African-American" for "black" without actually thinking about what the former term means ...
Come to think of it we could put the emphasis of either of the terms.
I do not use "African-American" to refer to non-Americans.
I even feel weird calling Obama an African-American (though I still do it, because he self-identifies as one). In my mental lexicon it usually specifically refers to descendants of the African slaves taken to the Americas a long time ago, whereas Obama's parents are a White American of English ancestry and a Kenyan who hadn't been to the US until college.
Ironically, Obama is exactly the kind of person to whom that term should refer, if it means anything at all. Descendants of African slaves taken to the Americas a long time ago should have another term, such as "American blacks".
Despite his lack of membership in it, Obama self-identifies with the latter group for obvious political reasons; after all, "children of foreign exchange students" is not an important constituency.