Preface to a Poem

I started this poem before the current campaign to make African-American the correct designation for people of African descent in the United States. I considered changing the title but upon reflection decided to stay with the more accurate designation. Africa, the continent, and America, the nation, no longer have equal weight in the cultural heritage of the people who were slaves. I know that nineteenth-century Christian missions to the continent and the matriculation of Africans at black colleges in the United States are examples of the continuing interplay between blacks in the New World and those in Africa. But, while important, such interactions were open to relatively few; and Africa, by the time of the Civil War, had not been a part of the lived or remembered experience of most of African descent held then in captivity. Of course, we continue to be influenced by our African heritage (and whites, and Europeans, have usurped much of the visible heritage for themselves-the white Britisher, George Michael, is the American Music Awards best R & B artist of 1988!), but what influences how we express whatever African-ness remains, after all this time, is the immediacy of our American experience. The most apt analogy, as we all know, is not between Italian-American, for example, and African-American but between Italian-American and Angolan-American or European-American and African-American. Angolan-American or Ghanian-American or ... would just point up what we are trying to obscure with this name change: except for Alex Haley, maybe, no person of African descent in the United States can say for sure what tribe or language group she or he came from since there were no countries or nations that Europeans recognized. We are not just another hyphenated-American immigrant group. We ought to stop trying to act like one and stop letting white people try to treat us like one. We have no country in the modern world unless, like Jews, we make one or, as Douglass, DuBois, Martin and, yes, Malcolm, too, urged, we adopt one. I'm with William Raspberry, whose recent column on this subject was headlined in the L.A. Times: Whatever the name, blacks or African-Americans still on the outside looking in. Far from eliciting or evoking respect, I think this name change just shows how confused we are. This is the third time in fifty years we have renamed ourselves (the fact that white people go along with our changes rather dutifully-after initial reluctance, to be sure-ought to tell us just how important they consider what we call ourselves. Consider how long we've been fighting against lynching, and white people still haven't stopped that); I think people are justified in asking if our scholars and intellectuals know who they are. Twenty years from now, today's buppies will be lobbying for Americans of color or some such phrase in an attempt to emphasize their soil

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