Muppett,

Well my mother's parents are from Barbados, and I know that my maternal great grandmother was White. So I guess that makes my Caribbean/Anglo. And due to my brown skin and tightly curled hair, and other features, I'm sure that I have African ancestry. So I know that on my maternal side I am African/Anglo/Caribbean. My father was African American, and he was legally adopted even way back in the late 1920s. So I know nothing of his ancestors, but since he was considerably lighter in complexion than my mother, I would suspect that there was some racial mixture there too. Who knows, maybe I also have some Native American ancestry or some Asian ancestry too.

All this to say that African Americans are a racially mixed population. If we were in South Africa, most African Americans would probably be considered "Coloured". Indeed, we did use "Colored" once upon a time [1950s-1960s?],but with a different meaning than the South African "Coloured". We went through alot of referents trying to find one that best fit us..including "African" as still refelected in the Protestant denominations African Methodist Episcopal [AME] and African Methodist Episcopal Zion [AMEZ}.

One of those referents that I still use informally is "Black", although it is no more accurate than "White" to describe skin color. Formally, I use the term African American. Yet I realize that "African American" doesn't describe with specificity the many sub-sets of that race. For instance, I have a two seperate families as friends who came from continental Africa- one in which the husband came from The Gambia, West Africa and the wife, African American and the other family in which both husband & wife came from Kenya, East Africa. The childern in both cases, and indeed the both sets of parents are considered to be African American, but they and, to a lesser extent their children who were born in the USA, have different cultural mores than me.

All this to say, African Americans are a wonderously diverse people....
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Stu,

Thanks for those interesting statistics. Just for the record, do you have source that you can post?