George Rebane
Kamala Harris’ insistence that she is African-American, in spite of the Jamaican detour of her father’s lineage, raises an interesting and, perhaps, important point on how we claim our racial roots in this age of political correctness. (more here) Not imposing any reasonable limits on climbing up our ancestral tree would, of course, allow each of us to call ourselves African-American. That would effectively kill that label’s semantic in American politics.
(A language derives its power from the accuracy and precision of its words or lexicon which allows its users to readily discriminate between shades of meaning. Therefore, the more words – precisely defined, meticulously preserved, and correctly used – within its lexicon, the more effective are the communications that a language supports in the sense of enabling complete, clear, and compact messaging. Semantically prostituted words with multiple meanings are inefficient and ambiguous, and require additional discriminative words to correctly communicate ideas and assertions. Today’s English is a mess created by our educational system.)
So, how far back should we go in claiming and projecting our ethno-racial heritage? In my case, I could call myself a Mongo-American since my racial derivation is from the Finno-Ugric segment of Europe’s Nordic clans. The Ugric tribes originally migrated westward from Mongolia, leaving some in the Ural Mountains of Russia before spreading out into eastern Europe. Estonians and Finns are genetically identical, and both speak what modern linguists call a Finno-Ugric language. Or perhaps I should proclaim myself to be an Ugric-American. I don’t know, but Estonian-American sounds as bland as Jamaican-American. Neither effectively communicates its aggrieved past as required in today's proper public use of identity politics. So what kind of hyphenated American are you?
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