Describe The Difference Between Black And African Americans

The reading about the indigenous people thought me how labels are used as an excuse to mistreat people. As the reading explain the term indigenous was only created to dehumanized and the over the land. Because the natives from American were not Christians they were not considered real people and with the help of the Pope, the European nations took over the land regardless that there were people already leaving there. It’s also interesting to see the used of indigenous as a nations, state or peoples. They should be able to represent themselves and their tribes and identify themselves with what it’s most convenient and useful for them. They need to be protected and be able to maintain their cultural identities.

It seems like the difference between Black and African-American is that the first one was used more in political settings where they thought there was a need to separate or divide people by their skin color while African-American was used by people who still identify themselves with African, Still both terms were created to alienate one group from the other. As the reading explains the term black “Maintained that physical differences between the races account for social and
psychological differences—that black (i.e., dark and not-yet- or not-quite-white) skin corresponds to a lower socially developed human form” Du Bois talks about double consciousness or the confusion feeling some people get by identifying themselves in more than one social identity. Many people identify themselves as African-American and American which are different things since the term American was used almost exclusively by Caucasian. This would lead to mixed feelings about being proud of your heritage and feeling inferior because of it. When I moved to this country I was, and still am, confused by the term African-American since it makes it seem like they are not “fully American” or that they belong to somewhere else first and American second, I also thought it was interesting to see how we also used Asian-American, Mexican-American but a Caucasian person would be just white or American.

As Latina/Hispanic I usually used both terms when talking about this diverse group of people.
Although I know how one term is different from the other, Latinos are people who come from Latin American, this would exclude Spain and Hispanic are people who speak Spanish, this would exclude Brazil but include Spain. Yet when I talk about myself I usually identify myself as Latina mainly because both of this labels come with different stereotypes. Latinos are seen as friendly, outgoing group of people while the term Hispanic is used to separate one group from another and it’s the label most politicians used when they mention negative and false stereotypes against us. It sad to see how people can use labels to feel superior to other groups of people just because of a few
differences.