Political Correctness

2007-08-11

Several weeks ago listening to the radio I heard an amusing phrase “Pushkin’s ancestor was a famous African American”.

Orest Kiprensky "Portrait of Alexander Pushkin" 1827

Maybe it is nessesary to explain that the greatest Russian poet A.S.Pushkin, whose portret you can see above, really was a direct descendant of a black man named Gannibal, a heir of a small North African land who had been kidnapped as a child and presented to tsar Peter I and then had built a succesful career in the Army. But neither Pushkin nor his famous black ancestor were not related to America in any way.

I almost forgot this, but yesterday I heard another phrase which made me think that the word “African American” concerning to Abraham Gannibal was not a slip of the tongue but such a deliberate decision. It appeared that “in Johannesburg there are African Americans live”. Do you think that calling citizens of Africa “Americans” even adding a prefics “African” is a little too much ?

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