Calling late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Virginians of
African descent "African Americans" is far more historically accurate
than calling them "Africans," regardless of their legal status as slaves
or free individuals forbidden to participate fully in citizenship. That
is because they were culturally American.

At the risk of oversimplifying a complex historical process that is
still only partially understood, the cultural Americanism of Virginia's
African Americans arose from several factors, including:

(1) The fact that as far as is known, no single African ethnicity
dominated the Africans who came to Virginia as slaves (some historians,
notably Douglas B. Chambers, have tried to argue otherwise, but their
arguments have yet to win general assent from other scholars);

(2) The fact that the economics of slavery in Virginia, in contrast to
(for example) South Carolina or the Caribbean, created a high degree of
continual contact between whites and blacks in the region, resulting in
cultural interchange from an early date and to a greater degree than in
any other American slavery-based society;

(3) The fact that slave importation to Virginia peaked around or
slightly before the middle of the eighteenth century, so that by the
time of the Revolution (for example), most slaves in the colony were not
only native-born, but also second- or third-generation Virginians.

The result was a creolized African and, soon, African-and-European
culture that was not only distinctively American--in the literal sense
of arising from circumstances unique to North America--but proved
enormously influential (through westward migration of slaveholders and
the interstate slave trade) on subsequent American history and culture.

If you'll forgive a mention of my own work, you can learn more about the
processes outlined above and about the pivotal importance of Virginia's
African American culture on one major dimension of American culture
generally in an essay I just published, "'Our National Poetry': The
Afro-Chesapeake Inventions of American Dance," in Julie Malnig, ed.,
Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

--Jurretta Heckscher


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