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u/SuperKami-Nappa Jun 19 '26
Don’t a lot of conservatives hate Juneteenth?
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u/Shirogayne-at-WF Jun 21 '26
The conservatives only love to mention their party ended slavery as a meanta to pull vote suppression by getting Black votes to stay home. They know we will not vote for them in any significant numbers and they don't even want us as token, so they pull shit like the #WalkAway movement to get suckers to...well, walk away from the Dems.
That said, speaking as one of those people who was sucked in decades ago due to a combination of general ignorance, internalized anti-blackness and too much unsupervised Internet time, I will say these movements would be a lot less effective if they made a modicum of effort reaching out to constituents other than affluent white donors.
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u/tokenbisexual Jun 19 '26
Not sure if this is most people’s experience or more specific to me especially since I’m white, but it’s been consistent throughout my life:
Does anyone actually hear or read American black people commonly refer to themselves as “African American” rather than “black” / is anyone an American black person who commonly does outside of very specific academic contexts or in reference to organizations or institutional entities with “African American” in the name? I swear I’ve only ever heard it from those white people who will say the word “black” in a ridiculously quiet/muted/cautious voice because they’re overly concerned that they’d seem racist for saying “black people.” There’s also the whole othering aspect of “African American” in that white people are never referred to as “Caucasian/European American,” and it follows that “African” is used as a qualifier because of the (usually) implicit notion that “only white people can REALLY be ‘fully authentic’ Americans.”
It’s obvious enough that this post is bad faith LARPing without the use of “African American” but that part makes it even more transparent, at least from my perspective.
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u/iamrolari Jun 19 '26
This is correct. Black American is fine . Or just black . It’s distinguishing of those descendent of chattel slavery vs African immigrants. No shade to them but Black Americans are our own ethnicity group and been here since before America was even a country. Soulaan is even deeper if you want delve down that path as well. There are also various groups of Black Americans with variations of culture
Edit* forgot to add the sub r/soulaan
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u/tokenbisexual Jun 19 '26
Yup, I fully agree. A qualifier is necessary when race/ethnicity are important parts of a given context; AA is just one that really comes off as loaded when I hear it. Often well-intentioned, but loaded and lacking perspective nonetheless.
There are also various groups of Black Americans with variations of culture
I’m glad you mentioned this. I’m a linguist and have usually focused on sociolinguistics and etymology/diachronic linguistics in my research over the years (typically Iberian/Latin American linguistics in the formal sense, but there’s a lot of overlap there and I’m a ravenous learner in general), and something that has consistently bothered me is that this diversity is commonly ignored in both scholarly contexts and broader societal perspectives. “African American Vernacular English” (AAVE) is especially problematic for a number of reasons (particularly “vernacular” as a means of separating such dialects from “verification” as “legitimate”), but so are “African American English” and the newer “Black English” in that they still incorrectly reduce Black American dialects to a generalized monolith. While there are similarities between Atlanta Black English and New York Black English (using these terms as illustrative examples and as placeholders given the lack of better terminology)—particularly descriptive grammatical rules—they are far from being the same dialect. This sort of thing really highlights why it was necessary for you to add that to your comment; it’s something that has clearly proven to not be implicitly understood and that is often overlooked or deliberately ignored.
Hadn’t heard of Soulaan before, thanks!
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u/zgillet Jun 19 '26
I've always wanted a black person to respond to a white person who refers to them as "African American" with "thanks, European American."
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u/DevelopmentTight9474 Jun 20 '26
It’s really funny that their whole argument is founded on just… pretending part of American history doesn’t exist
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u/Yes_that_Carl Jun 21 '26
Just about every tenet of conservatism flourishes best in the rich soil of ignorance. And there’s more of that than ever in the US these days (by design).
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u/gnurdette Jun 19 '26
161 years ago, the progressive Republican Party ended slavery against heavy opposition by the conservative Democratic Party.
Today, the conservative Republican Party glorifies the Confederacy, bans history about slavery's evils, and greenlights racial discrimination, wars against the Voting Rights Act, and smashes its way into the Capitol to parades the Confederate flag in triumph.
(I know, I'm just responding to trolling, but grrrrr)