My wife and I were talking about visiting Croatia when she retires in a few years. Lucky you to live there.
Photo ID for buying booze.
Photo ID for getting into a pub. etc etc.
Photo ID for all sorts of numpty crap.
Possible life threatening surgical procedure:
Surgeon: "What is your name?"
Me: "xxxxxxxxxxxx"
Surgeon: "What is your date of birth?"
Me: "xxx/xx/xxxx"
Surgeon: "OK, we're ready to go."
No photo ID required, and it all worked out OK.
If I'd just typed a very long post (and frequently seen the icon that says "saved" flash up) but then accidentally deleted it...
How would I get it back?
Go back to the main menu, click on the hamburger symbol (the three horizontal lines), click on “latest,” click on the title of the thread, scroll down to the bottom of the last page of the thread. Your draft post should be showing there in faint print. Click anywhere on the post and you should be able to finish it. If you don’t see it at the bottom of the last page, click “reply” and that may bring your draft back up.
You'll have to ask Jesse Jackson about the term 'African-American', he invented it 1988:
″Just as we were called colored, but were not that, and then Negro, but not that, to be called black is just as baseless,″ Jackson said at a news conference on December 19, 1988, after meeting with the group of Black leaders. ″To be called African-Americans has cultural integrity. It puts us in our proper historical context. Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base. African- Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity,” he said.
So "cultural integrity". And here we are.
Surveys of Hispanic and Latino Americans have found that the vast majority prefer other terms such as Hispanic and Latina/Latino to describe themselves, and that only 2–3% use Latinx.
A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that roughly three-quarters of U.S. Latinos were not aware of the term Latinx; of those aware of it, 33% (i.e., about 8% of all U.S. Latinos) said it should be used to describe their racial or ethnic group, while 65% said it should not.
I appreciate you sharing your outsider's perspective of what it means to be an American, but for me, it misses the heart of it. Respectfully, I don't think you have the first clue as to what it means to have a historically black college in America. I don't want this to sound rude or hot-headed. But you are way off-base.
In the late 1930s, my grandfather emigrated from Yugoslavia to America by boat and received American citizenship. My father is an American by birth who returned to Croatia in the late 80s, where I was born. There is a huge community of Croats in Chicago, but they all declare themselves as Americans and not as Croatian-Americans, even though they are very proud of their roots just like Irish, German etc. When I asked my grandfather what does he consider himself, the first thing he said was American. My point was that I rarely see someone identify as something-American, but absolutely all blacks identify as African-American. I am a Croat, although I think that I might be able to apply for citizenship on the basis of my father, but I am not interested in that. I don't mean to be rude, I just want to understand..
The simple answer to your question is ‘choice’.
Your grandfather chose to emigrate to America for economic (or political) reasons, whereas Africans were hunted, captured, shackled and transported to the Americas and sold into slavery against their will.
Even when slavery was abolished their decedents were ‘othered’ and lived under an apartheid regime in large swathes of the US.
Whilst other immigrant populations undoubtedly faced discrimination, no white immigrants suffered apartheid in the same way.
Jim Crow laws continued to ‘other’ black Americans right up until 1965 - that’s within my lifetime ( and many others on OF. )
So black Americans didn’t segregate themselves but were forced into a defined demographic against their will and, whilst not entirely ideal for the promotion of a cohesive society, it is entirely understandable why they might now choose to embrace that label for themselves.
