There are roughly 300 million African-Americans living in the United States. That's exactly equal to 100% of its population. About a week ago, a solid majority of these African-Americans elected their 44th African-American President, Barack Obama (see accurate prediction in previous post).
In fact, African-Americans have had held the seats of power in every government of every country since the birth of the nation-state.
Dats right. Because we is all black.
And I mean that in the most racist way possible.
We are all members of the same genome/species/race that originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago and we're in the process of completing a grand tour of planet Earth.
It took us a good 130,000 years to get off our collective ass and head north out of Africa to Europe and the Middle East, eventually spreading across Asia and into North America....and apparently as far back as 50,000 BC the Steve Fossets of the world were still unnecessarily doing crazy shit and island hopping across the open Pacific in tree-trunk canoes...
Nonetheless, human origin and migration means three interesting things related to the politics of race in America:
1. For 70% of our entire history as a species, every single human being on Earth has had "black" skin. We didn't see any significant change in skin pigmentation until we moved away from the equator about 60,000 years ago (this map claims it was 100,000 years ago, but that's outdated).
2. When skin color, eye shape, and other subtle "racial" differences did begin to develop, no one noticed. Such changes would take countless generations to happen, and humans from different "skin zones" simply didn't have the technology to travel and come into contact with each other very often.
3. This all means that evolutionarily, we aren't used to seeing other humans with remarkably different skin color, etc. (and when we did, they were undoubtedly from another tribe very far away). This makes the dehumanization of other people based upon physical characteristics a relatively easy task for most homo sapiens.
Overcoming this "easy task" is what makes Barack Obama's election so special. The idea that 57 million non-black-skinned members of our species fought this urge, got together and elected a man who 'looks like someone who lives far away' to lead their nation is truly unprecedented-- possibly in all of human history.
Through the long history of our species, and the even longer history of human evolution, the modern idea of the hyphenated nationality 'African-American' (even 'Native American') becomes totally laughable.
At the end of the day such words are actually speed bumps for cultural cohesion. Depending on your politics, this can be a very good or very bad thing. Either way, just know that if you go back far enough, every single American president ever elected to office has had family from Kenya.
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