American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen. – Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1992
I did a book in 1996, an overview of black history. In that process I became more aware of a lot of the black inventors of the 19th century. – Kareem Abdul-Jabbar