By Selwyn Duke

Call him an “An Old-Fashioned Man” if you want, to quote one of his song’s titles, but there’s something you’d better not call Smokey Robinson: African-American. The legendary 82-year-old crooner made this crystal clear recently while appearing on The View, saying, among other things, that black servicemen dying in our wars didn’t give their lives for African nations — they died for America.

The topic arose, music website Vibe reported Thursday, because for Black History Month a teacher had animated a 2004 poem Robinson penned entitled “A Black American.” The singer was then asked about the poem’s meaning in The View interview, and the first thing he stated, emphatically, was “I resent being called an African-American — I really do.”

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