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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

My dad had a work anecdote about a company invite to an "African-American tie event".

It was a British company.

My South African sister in-law who recently immigrated to America said that her black peers in grade school would sometimes refer to themselves as African American.

Cultural hegemony complete.

It's not too surprising in America, but I know a person who would refer to any Black person as African American in Europe. In most cases, neither party would have had set their foot in America in their lives.

I think parent talks about people in South Africa referring to themselves as ‘African American’.

Yes, this was happening in classrooms in South Africa.

For good or bad, in many underdeveloped places where black people are rare, they are intuitively perceived as Americans (which stereotypically means rich, cool, free and capable of teaching you great English) and treated with additional respect because of this.

I had a South African friend in middle and high school. They fled the country when it became popular to put a tire around a white person's neck, full it with gasoline, and light it. Mandela's wife promoted doing this.

They gained American citizenship. She became my African American friend. Everyone told me I was terrible for talking that way.

Heard my daughter using the n-word for her school mates (they ain't black) - they all listened to rap music and obviously our schooling system don't cover American history i.r.o slavery.

Had to explain to her why it would not be good idea to do that in the US.

I never believed in the idea of embracing an offensive word and somehow "taking out the sting" like rappers did.

We have a similiar word - the k word for blacks - it is fortunaly banned and if you used it on social media you clearly identify as a racist.

I'm a little confused - are you talking about Black South Africans? Hmm.

I foolishly expected that people like Elon Musk could be truthfully called "African-American", but I did a survey of the definitions, and most all of them agreed that an African-American must be Black (and I'm not sure how that is recursively defined, or whether it has to do with race, ethnicity, or simply color of skin: it must be the latter if it has any meaning separate from "African"!)

Typically, African-American means black AND, unintuitively, American for generations IME. Maybe it shouldn't mean that but that's kind of assumed where I live at least. For first or second generation Americans you might use the country (eg Nigerian-American). For other races from Africa you'd also rarely hear them referred to as African American.

It's a bit weird from the outside tho cause if you're a white south-african and you hear the phrase used in America you'd be like "oh, I should refer to myself as an African-American" although unlike Americans, people generally only refer to themselves as being from the place once they have citizenship (and would therefore have learnt the intricacies of the American phrase) and even then many people choose not to.

American: "I'm Irish" Me: "No, you're not"

Of course, part of the issue here is that there isn't really a good shorthand term for "the group of American Black people of diverse African origin whose cultures were oppressed and destroyed by the white majority for centuries, leading to a mélange culture intentionally constructed out of the remaining scraps".

But "Caucasian" is (was?) used for people who for many generations weren't anywhere near Caucasus Mountains.

Oh God I hope people showed up in some outrageously... I don't even know what, but just some outrageous (not black bow) ties. That's brilliant.

I could see how some ties could upset everyone.

Alternatively, that's how you end up with an accidental cakewalk.

The Scunthorpe problem

In my experience Americans are shocked that it's perfectly fine to say that someone's black in the UK.

Those of us who follow usage guidelines more closely know that it's OK to use the 'b-word'. Case in point, https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-us-news-busine...

It gets an even more politically incorrect meaning when you read "tie" as a verb.

> It gets an even more politically incorrect meaning when you read "tie" as a verb.

The change from "black tie" to "african-american tie" seems much less like a goofy 'find and replace' fail when you read it that way.

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