Black Rising: An Editorial Note on the Increasing Popularity of a US American Racial Ethnonym

Abstract

In historic protests sparked by the wrongful deaths of US civilians, demonstrators have taken to the streets in record numbers demanding justice and an end to institutionalized racism. US media coverage of this movement has frequently utilized the racial ethnonym Black as opposed to African(-) American. As this note discusses, this choice in nomenclature may not only be due to the increasing prominence of the Black Lives Matter Movement. It may also be indicative of earlier, large-scale shifts in autonymy. This note presents some of the demographic, linguistic, and sociopolitical factors that may well have played a role in the rising use of Black as both an ethnoracial and political identifier.

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“…Except when quoting other authors, we have chosen to employ the term “Black” rather than “African American” as an adjective describing a person’s race. As Nick (2020) notes, since the death of Trayvon Martin in 2013, members of Black communities have increasingly used Black rather than the more assimilationist African American to define themselves. In both the 1960s and in current struggles against police violence and commemorative erasures, the use of Black is a statement that Black lives, both those lived in the past and those lived in the present, should not be defined by White society.…”