This is a typical article from the school of thought that ignores power relationships in order to intentionally equivocate between decisions people have made as individuals, and decisions power structures have enforced from above.

If I'm not mistaken, the earliest form of this dilemma comes from the place where most contemporary cultural controversies spring, from the black civil rights struggle in the US[0].

1. The people formally known as "Negroes" or "Colored," in the mid-1960s at the culmination of a struggle that ended in legal equality, as a group mostly decided they wanted to be called "black" as a way to put them on the same level as "whites." This was the first "politically-correct" thing that I can recall, if you define that as words that have to be said, regardless of the attitude behind them. "Negro" would from then on be seen as hostile, although black people and the most aggressive antislavery and anti Jim Crow whites would have exclusively used "Negro" just a few years before. If you were always a moral paragon when it comes to black issues and just had been out of the loop for a few years, when you returned to the conversation you ran the risk of being yelled at for an innocuous, or even kind and insightful statement that contained the word "Negro."

2. But to illustrate imposition from above, the next change was from "black" to "African-American." This was a term engineered by a small group of "pan-African" activists that managed to find purchase within the Democratic "Rainbow/PUSH Coalition" led by Jessie Jackson in his bid for the Democratic Nomination in 1984. The concept of the Rainbow Coalition (as a campaign) was to transfer Jackson's success as a black civil rights activist to a concept of the nation as a federation of minority rights activist groups, with Jackson becoming the head coordinator of all of these groups as POTUS.

Jackson had made his living as a negotiator between businesses/institutions and the black public during controversies, either after communication had broken down or even preemptively. His basically decent politics, and his authority from having stood next to MLK, and from saying positive things that rhymed in a preacher's voice, would calm the public down, and he would tutor the companies on the magic words to say to make black people feel better while making trivial concessions.

"African-American" (as influenced by the pan-Africans) was the magic word that came out of the Rainbow Coalition (later, in 1989), and it was simply proclaimed to be the new respectful word for black people. White people adopted it immediately. The New Democrats, who had famously introduced themselves to the world by destroying the Rainbow Coalition, grabbed onto the word as a means to feign affinity with the concerns of the campaign they'd just destroyed.

This was entirely a top-down mandate. It is still a top-down mandate. Although it is an absolute requirement to use in professional in institutional circles, to the extent that in the 90s and early 00s people in the UK were accidentally calling black British people "African-Americans" and people were referring to Africans themselves as "African-Americans." You can say "black" if you're a white person, but it can give off an air of being overly familiar, smarmy and faux-chummy (like "folks" along with it.)

Black Americans currently do not prefer African-American.[1][2] In 1991, when the term had nearly already been made standard, "black" was preferred to "African-American" 72% to 15%.[3] I've been black all my life (never even met a white person who wasn't a teacher until I was 13) and I've rarely met a black person who referred to themselves as African-American. Yet, when institutional media talked about the term "black" in 2012, they discussed the fact that black people seem to prefer it as if they were talking about people who were riding penny-farthings and wearing pocketwatches.

> The labels used to describe Americans of African descent mark the movement of a people from the slave house to the White House. Today, many are resisting this progression by holding on to a name from the past: "black." [4]

Attacks on language are generally authoritarian impositions, coming from government and other powerful institutions. Attacks on language about minorities also seem to be, like so many other things, everybody in the world seeing themselves in the black civil rights struggle and thus relegating the black civil rights struggle to a metaphor for the real struggle - which is their own, against whatever annoys them personally at the time.

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[0] The world follows the US, and the US is obsessed with its slaves and their descendants, it's just a historical accident.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/vault/315566/gallup-vault-black-amer...

[2] https://atlantablackstar.com/2021/08/11/new-poll-shows-black...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/29/us/poll-says-most-blacks-...

[4] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna46264191