The word Black refers to the ethnicity of the African-American people—the Black ethnic group—as reference to the color of the people or other biological and/or racial features. Blacks are the only pure race that originated from Africa hundreds of years ago before migrating to other parts of the world and eventually differentiated into different races (Wright, p. 1) There are Black people in the United States and there are also black people (used as a descriptive adjective).
The Black ethnic group in America are descendants of African slaves of colonies that were brought to North America between 17th and 19th centuries. When the slavery ended, they became black citizens of different countries specifically in the West Indies and assumed national names and identities. When these black people came to the United States, they became American citizens and their national identities were converted to ethnic identities like Jamaican, Barbadian or Trinidadian which constitutes the whole Black American race.
According to Naomi Zack, a Black philosopher, “There is no set of necessary, sufficient, or necessary and sufficient traits that all members of any race have in common”. Zack also writes that traits vary tremendously over time and from place to place. This only means that a race had to be pure to be a race and thus Black people, including all its sub-groupings can be considered as a race. William Du Bois referred to the Black people as Negro (1915). He puts that races were not and should not be considered pure biological realities.
Slavery, slave trade and slave community are regrettably the common features of histories of Black people. In the following years of the Civil War, Black women were called “Mammy”, faithful female slaves who had been “like one of the family”. These “mammies” had nursed white babies, cared for white adults in sickness and death and had been always loyal to her beloved mistresses and masters.
In his 1979 autobiography, Olaudah Equiano...