Linguist: It's Time to Ditch 'African American'

John McWhorter is a linguist who describes himself as Black, not African American. In a New York Times op-ed, McWhorter makes the case that the latter term should be retired for good. For him, and he suspects a lot of others, the link to Africa has never felt right. The "African connection is too long ago. It's too abstract," he tells colleague David Leonhardt in a Times interview amplifying his op-ed. "Italian American is one thing. Your mother, your grandmother speaks Sicilian, and you're eating Italian food and you have a certain way of talking. There's a whole culture." Not so with most African Americans in that regard, he adds.

Plus, does it really make sense to use a label that technically includes white people who hail from various nations in Africa? "A term that is meant to be descriptive but that can refer to Cedric the Entertainer, Trevor Noah, Elon Musk and Zohran Mamdani is a little silly," he writes. McWhorter traces the origins of African American back to Jesse Jackson in the 1980s. The intentions were sound, but the term has run its course, he writes. "All along we've had a perfectly good word to describe Black people: Black. We should just use that." (Read the full op-ed and the subsequent interview.)