Afro-American Self Identity

During US history, labels had played an important role in identifying groups and individuals belonging to groups. This has been especially true for racial and ethnic groups in general, but for Blacks in particular. Identities are the way you recognize yourselves and how you are viewed by the world. Your features and characteristics defines your self-identity while your national and cultural identity defines your group identities.

Some identities will changes while some will stay the same. Your self-identity changes over time and can evolve in a direction that you take it or in a direction that someone else may take it on your behalf. This may include aspects of your life that you have no control over, such as where you grew up or the color

Moore states that “the word Negro is so saturated with filth, so polluted with the white man 's stereotypes, that there is nothing to be done but to get rid of it." He prefered the word "Afro-American" because of its "correctness, exactness, even elegance." He believed the adoption of the word will force European-Americans to reevaluate black people in terms of their history and culture. Afro-American was first used as an adjective in 1853 in a publication in Windsor, Ontario, Voice of the Fugitive. But the world did not know that the prefix “Afro” exist, but America knew the word as the popular 1970 's hairstyle that Blacks would

Black, was the initial point of Negros identifying as a people. Around 1965," art critic Richard J. Powell writes, "Blacks began to find the racial and cultural designation "Negro" not only antiquated, but suggestive of a less transcendent and revelatory time than the one in which they were currently living.” Many Blacks, especially the young, saw the switch in self-designation from "the purportedly acquiescent “Negro” to the seemingly assertive “Black" as not only symbolic, but an emphatic proclamation of an oppressed people 's psychological reorientation. This was start of the Black Power movement.

It was the separation from white america, by identifying with the complete opposite of white. And because of the many shades of dark skin pigmentation, Black became the true rainbow of colors. Some people say black is not a color, but it exist as pigments or skin coloring agents. If the three primary colors (red, yellow and blue) are combined, black is created. In essence, black contains all colors.

As a people, the dictionary defines Black as a person belonging to any of various population groups having dark pigmentation of the skin.