Black American Attitudes Towards Africa

An introduction to the complex relationship between African Americans and the African continent What is an “African American” and how does this identity relate to the African continent? Rising immigration levels, globalization, and the United States’ first African American president have all sparked new dialogue around the question. This book provides an introduction to the relationship between African Americans and Africa from the era of slavery to the present, mapping several overlapping diasporas. The diversity of African American identities through relationships with region, ethnicity, slavery, and immigration are all examined to investigate questions fundamental to the study of African American history and culture.

In 1968, Winthrop D. Jordan set out in encyclopedic detail the evolution of white Englishmen's and Anglo-Americans' perceptions of blacks, perceptions of difference used to justify race-based slavery, and liberty and justice for whites only. This second edition, with new forewords by historians Christopher Leslie Brown and Peter H. Wood, reminds us that Jordan's text is still the definitive work on the history of race in America in the colonial era. Every book published to this day on slavery and racism builds upon his work; all are judged in comparison to it; none has surpassed it.

Between the end of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of World War 2, Africans displaced by colonial rule created an African-American myth - a myth which aggrandized the life and attainments of African Americans despite full knowledge of the discrimination to which they were subjected. The myth provided Africans in all parts of the continent with much needed succour and underpinned various religious, educational, political and social models based on the experience of African Americans whereby Africans sought to better their own lives.

This is the second edition and an expanded version of the first one. The work examines relations between Africans, African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans and the problems they face when they interact and how they see each other. It also looks at what unites them and what separates them. Relations between members of these groups, which are sometimes described as distinct ethnic groups, are characterised by tensions, harmony and indifference towards each other in spite of their common identity as a people of African origin. The author explains why. This edition includes new material and complements the author's other works, “Relations Between Africans and African Americans: Misconceptions, Myths and Realities,” and “Africans and African Americans: Complex Relations, Prospects and Challenges.”

This book presents an interpretation and analysis of the phenomenon of ambivalence so persistent in the Afro-American consciousness of Africa. Today a wide range of black opinion has accepted Pan-Africanism and Africa and many are consciously making an effective attempt to create more links with Africa. The right of blacks to be culturally independent is now accepted, at least verbally, without question. But this was not always the case. The present study is offered as an exploration in the field of social identity as it affects people in diaspora. The identity of every people is shaped in their environment, it is a legacy of historical forces.

Meriwether explores the dynamic nature of Africa's role in African American lives from the middle 1930s to the early 1960s, during the confluence of the liberation struggles in Africa and the civil rights movement in the United States.

This book discusses differences between African and American culture, to help prevent cultural miscommunications which might poison or ruin relationships between Africans and Americans. I am lucky to have lived in both Africa and America, and I feel priviledged and obliged to share my views and experiences with others.

The author, born and brought up in Africa, looks at relations between Africans and African Americans which have sometimes been described by different observers as "stormy," "complex," "sticky," and even "hostile" as one Nigerian professor put it. This is the third edition which includes information about African immigrants in the United States. Together with foreign students from Africa, they constitute the largest number of continental Africans who interact with African Americans on daily basis.