Why We Must Become Black American

For Juneteenth and 250th anniversary of the United States, I chose to raise a flag outside my home—not the traditional stars and stripes, but the red, black, and green flag symbolizing the sacrifices of African-descended peoples in this country. 

That flag signifies my father’s and my son’s military service, as well as the sacrifices of countless Black relatives who fought in American wars long before this nation recognized their full humanity. It reflects years of wrestling with what it means to love a country that has so often despised us.

Therefore, I contend that Black people in the United States should deliberately reclaim and inhabit the term African American as a holistic identity that integrates our African ancestry and our American civic belonging, while rejecting narrow notions of patriotism that exclude us.

John McWhorter’s essay, “African American is Awkward. It’s Time to Use Black,” where he argues that Black more accurately describes descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States. While I acknowledge the clarity of Black, I argue it is insufficient on its own. To stop at Black risks confining our identity within a racial category created by white supremacy. African American offers a fuller framework: it names our political status, cultural experience, and diasporic connections.

The passing of Jesse Jackson, who popularized the term African American in the late 1980s, invites reconsideration of his insistence on this self-designation. Jackson understood that naming is political. To call ourselves African American is to assert agency, refusing to be reduced to either a racial problem or an undefined minority.

The Twoness of Blackness

In the United States, Blackness has never been a neutral descriptor. It has functioned as a political status, social position, and cultural formation. Whiteness has likewise operated as a legal and economic construct conferring power and presumed innocence. Within this order, Blackness has been associated with enslavement, segregation, surveillance, and dispossession.

Race itself is a fiction—biologically incoherent yet socially lethal. It emerged to rationalize conquest, colonization, and slavery by framing non-European peoples as inferior. The primary difference between those labeled Black and white is not genetic, but structural: disparities in resources, authority, and legitimacy.

Yet Blackness is not only political status. It is also culture. The Black church, jazz, blues, hip-hop, vernacular speech, and visual art have all emerged from Black communities and profoundly shaped American life.

W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, described the “double consciousness” of the Negro as “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” He was naming the structural tension of being both Black and American in a society insisting those terms are incompatible.

The challenge is not to choose between Blackness and Americanness, but to hold both. Black acknowledges our political and cultural location; African American extends that claim, situating us within a broader historical arc that includes Africa and beyond.

Reclaiming Our American Birthright

Embracing American identity is burdensome for a people shaped by slavery, racial violence, and structural racism. To love the United States under these conditions is not sentimental—it is moral and political. Yet refusing American identity outright leaves its meaning unchallenged, ceding it to those who would define it in exclusively white, Christian nationalist terms.

Historically, African Americans have borne a disproportionate burden in making democracy real—from Crispus Attucks, the first person killed in the Boston Massacre, to Black soldiers in every U.S. war. Likewise, Black political movements—from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter—have expanded democracy for all. To call ourselves American is not to endorse a sanitized national story. It is to claim both the debt this country owes us and the role we have played in shaping it.

Travel often exposes the paradox of Black American identity: outside the United States, we are generally perceived first and foremost as Americans, even as we may also be recognized as Black. Within U.S. borders, however, many of us struggle to see ourselves as fully American, experiencing chronic doubts about our belonging, as if we are perpetually on probation in our own country, 

To embrace our American identity is an act of political self-assertion. It demands full civic participation: voting, shaping policy, and holding officials accountable. Our labor, taxes, and sacrifices entitle us to co-authorship of the American story.

Embracing Our African Identity

If American identity locates us nationally, African identity situates us globally. In the U.S., Black people are framed as a minority. But globally, people of African descent constitute a vast and growing portion of humanity. The “minority” in one nation belongs to a worldwide majority.

This challenges the psychology of marginalization. It reminds us our history did not begin on plantations, nor is our future confined to American borders. Embracing African identity means acknowledging lineages rooted in civilizations, traditions, and intellectual histories across the continent and diaspora.

Religious identity illustrates this. In The Gospel and My Black Skin, J. P. Foster shows that Christianity has deep African roots predating European mass conversion. He traces how European powers distorted theology to justify slavery while African theologians developed liberative interpretations. This dismantles the myth that Christianity is inherently white.

Within the U.S., embracing African identity also means cultivating deeper relationships with African immigrants, Caribbean populations, and Afro-Latinos. It requires resisting narratives that divide us and instead engaging in mutual education about Jim Crow, colonialism, and global economic exploitation.

Living as Truly African American

The term African American has existed for nearly four decades, but our practice has often lagged behind the language. This identity carries obligations. On the American side, it calls us to reject permanent unbelonging and engage fully in civic life. On the African side, it calls for deeper engagement with the continent and diaspora through education, economic partnerships, and cultural exchange.

African American affirms that we descend from Africans forced into bondage, freedom fighters who expanded democracy, and a worldwide Black community whose struggles and triumphs remain intertwined with our own.

Ultimately, embracing African American is an act of intellectual clarity and political courage. It refuses the false choice between Africa and America, between Blackness and citizenship. It names our full reality and demands that this nation—and the world—reckon with it.

Dr. Joseph L. Jones is Professor of Political Science and Executive Director of the W.E.B Du Bois Southern Center for Studies in Public Policy at Clark Atlanta University.