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

We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice. – Carter Woodson, 1926