Quote:
Originally Posted by Docere
At the time, they (mainly) meant African American. They did mention the older West Indian community though. In the 1920s about a quarter of the black population was West Indian. By the 1960s the share that was West Indian origin was probably 10% as the Second Great Migration increased the AA population. But then Caribbean immigration took off again. Today I think NYC blacks are roughly evenly split between AA and West Indian.
|
Was there ever a specific term that local AA used to distinguish themselves from later immigrant-origin blacks or endonyms/exonyms used at the time the two groups had for each other (I mean, black would have been ambiguous even then, right, from an outsider's perspective the color line dominated, but members of a group tend to draw distinctions lost on outsiders like assimilated German Jews did with their later Eastern European peers, or how there are more specific terms for "old stock Hispanics" in the Southwest USA etc. Tejanos, Hispanos, Californios etc. It's not uncommon for insider/outsider lines to be drawn differently looking in and out)?
Kind of reminds me of how "Scots-Irish" later distinguished themselves from Irish Catholics but they didn't need to make this distinction until the latter were arriving in large numbers.
I guess in much of US history, there were not enough non-"old stock" AA to define themselves in opposition to.