My father’s birth certificate says he is a “Negro.” My birth certificate says I am “Colored.” My daughter’s says she is “African-American.” My grandson’s says he is “Black.” We have four generations from the same bloodline, but we are identified with four different words to describe the same ethnicity.

I don’t mind being called “Colored,” or that my daddy was a “Negro.” But some people want to get rid of these words. They are offended by them. They do not realize that each word tells a story about our history. Each word tells us who we are and what we have gone through to get where we are.

That’s the only way you can measure success. You must measure it based on where you started out, not based on the achievements of others.

In other words, you cannot compare the progress of Blacks to the progress of Whites in America and then call the Black man inferior. Nor can you compare Blacks to Africans or any other race or culture. We are the only race of people who have had their native history stolen from them.

In his book, “Survival Strategies for Africans in America,” Anthony T. Browder states, “We Africans in America have been socially engineered to reject our past, and far too many of us live in a state of suspended animation. We deny the historical realities confronting us daily. Too many of us mistakenly believe that the past has no bearing on the present and is unrelated to the future. Thus, we have been conditioned to live our lives disconnected from cultural values, principles and ideals essential for peaceful living.”

Basically, Browder is saying we do not know who we are. When Blacks were stolen from their native land of Africa, American slave traders forbid them from speaking in their native languages or passing on their culture. As a punishment, they would be separated from their loved ones, beaten and sometimes even killed.

Even after slavery, the only thing Blacks knew about Africa was what the White man showed us. It was not until the world began to cry out against apartheid that Blacks began to see different images than the grass skirt wearing, spear carrying cannibals shown in National Geographics magazine. We had no real knowledge of our ancestral history.

And history is important. There is an old saying that if you don’t know where you come from, you can’t know where you’re going. Our native ancestors also have a saying that is related to the sankofa bird, which flies forward while looking backward with an egg in its beak. The egg symbolizes the future. Sankofa is expressed in the Akan language as “se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenki,” meaning, “it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot.” In other words, we must go back to our roots, our history, and learn from it so that we can move forward.

Many Blacks today are trying to do that. They want to go back to Africa in order to “find out who they are,” but in doing so, they overlook the history we have. This is the reason they call themselves “African” American, to remind Blacks that we are descendants of Africa.

But we need to remember our American history too. We are a “new nation” of people. While some of our culture, actions, behaviors and choices may be steeped in African history, our social and economic challenges are steeped in American history. It explains why we are where we are and what we have gone through to get here. And when you understand these things, you realize that we came to a country whose language and ways we didn’t know and thrived. We did it without ESL and we are being asked to adjust to the new majority race without SSL (Spanish as a Second Language). And we will.

We are used to being challenged. We are a people who have had to fight for everything we have. The freedoms we enjoy came as a result of our Black American forefathers who fought and died so we could be free, get an education, and own business and property without fear of lynching.

Now every other culture is benefiting from the battles we fought and yet, many of our people are taking those gains for granted. A few kind-hearted Whites joined us in the picket lines, marches and demonstrations.

Blacks, Negroes, Coloreds, African-Americans are a great people. I make no apologies about who I am or my love or preference for my people. It is human nature to feel this way about a person’s own people. And given our history and what we have over come, no people should be any prouder of their heritage than Blacks.