Gotta go with my guy 4 Dimensional on this one. Not openly claiming to be of West African decent isn't disregarding anything or anyone.
It's been 100s maybe 1000s of years since people in my bloodline have been anywhere on African soil. We was all in Jamaica just last June.
It just seem more natural to identify with the part of one's culture that they encounter and navigate on a daily basis
And not for nothing but have you ever be called an African-American in front of an actual African. I know everyone is different so I'm not making any blanket statements. But back in high school we had an kid from Ghana come in halfway thru my 11th grade year and he did NOT fuck with that term African-American.
Not for himself and not evening for Black Americans in the school. I never got to really sit down and talk to him about it, but I remember how he'd be ready to throw hands over that African-American term.
And that was my point.
Everything that exist about many Black Americans is stimulated from the social engineering caused by slavery. At some point, our connection to Africa was replaced with the environment in which we existed in.
Over time, black Americans adapted and developed their own culture which is mostly separated from countries in Africa.
There are synergic connections, but the cultural separations is very significant.
So when I’m in a room with a student whose parents is from Sierra Leone, but she was born here, then she is much more of an African-American than me. It’s those instances where I’m more of a Black America. We rarely hear things like Nigerian-American, Ghana-American, Senegalese American, and so forth, which make more sense because they identify with the country they came from.
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