Afrindeur-American?

To the Editors of the Crimson:

The recent declaration by Reverend Jesse Jackson that Americans of African ancestry should henceforth be known as African-Americans adds a popular voice to a concept put forth by Black intellectuals for many years. This is a very serious matter because it involves the labeling of some 30 million North Americans (and millions in the Caribbean and Latin America) who can trace part of their ancestry back to Africa. In our search for a positive identity of our own choosing, we have gone from African, to Colored, to Negro, to Black (a protest term which demonstrated that we preferred to identify with our African rather than our European-American past).

While the term African-American does represent an advance in the continual evolution toward a true identity for a people whose ancestors were forcibly brought to this hemisphere by Europeans, forcibly held in slave labor and forcibly mixed in racial composition, it may be imprecise, or equivocal at best.

Genetically, almost all of today's "Black Americans" are a racial mixture of African, Native American Indian and European bloodlines. Regardless of the surface color (phenotypy), we are a unique genetic creation of this hemisphere, and America is our only home. Perhaps the name Afrindeur-American would be more precise. Dr. S. Allen Counter   Director, Harvard Foundation