The official word, the nice, polite, formal word in my 1950s/1960s childhood, was “Negro,” as in, “The United Negro College Fund.” You may remember them as the people who created that wonderful phrase, “The mind is a terrible thing to waste.” Nowadays, we’d call it the politically correct word. Back then, we were more apt to label it simply as “respectful.”
Equally respectful, but less formal, was “Colored,” as in The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP. “Black,” on the other hand, seemed at least mildly derogatory and lacking in respect.(Footnote 1)
Yet, sometime in the mid 60s, “Black” replaced “Negro” as the word of choice. I didn’t like it.
My opinion was meaningless, as it should be, me being a White kid and all, but a good portion of the melanin-blessed community agreed with me. They had the same discomfort with a faintly disparaging term replacing the acknowledged respectful one. We all got outvoted, though, by the overwhelming majority of the effected population so I learned to get comfortable calling people what they wished to be called. I figured that’s what respect actually means.
I had much more trouble adapting when we awoke one day to learn that the proper term would henceforth be “African American.” Perhaps that seems strange, because “African American” never had the negative connotation that “Black” once did. Yet there were problems, a big one being utility.
Do you know that there are racists in England and Australia? In France and Spain and Germany? And in other places too? I suspect you do. Do you know what there are damned few of in any of those places? African Americans. If you want to talk about racism in any non-USA-centric manner, “African American” is not a particularly useful phrase.
In fact, should you want to discuss the joint heritage of any group of relatively recent African descent(Footnote 2) in any context, “African American” is bloody damned limiting.
My other problem, and a mighty one it was, had to do with how the change came into being. While there’s no telling who first adopted “Black” as a term of pride, in the end it was a group decision. It came from the grass roots, echoing through songs like, “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” and popular mantras like, “Black is Beautiful.”
“African American,” on the other hand, took a path to the top that sounded more like the beginning of a (possibly offensive) joke: “A bunch of Black leaders walked into a hotel…” They emerged a few days later to proclaim that “African American” was now the One True Term.
As with the earlier switch over to “Black,” my perception is not the one that mattered. None the less it felt like a small handful of people were pushing through a new euphemism for something that needed euphemizing about as much as my keyboard here needs a hula hoop. But you wouldn’t know that from the reaction. The announcement kicked off a weekend frenzy as folks scurried to meet Monday in full compliance. Word processors shifted into search-and-replace hyperdrive, leading to mirthful tales of business reports showing how innovations were taking operations out of the red and into the African American.
I swallowed the irrelevence of my White opinion and once again adjusted. For a while. Then I noticed that most of my Black friends and associates continued to call themselves Black unless they were referring to a context where both African descent(Footnote 3) and American citizenship were an issue. It seems perfectly appropriate to discuss how a federal program will effect African American families, but my friend Bill is Black. Pele was Black, Nelson Mandela was Black, the Fifteenth Doctor is Black, Lupita Nyong’o is deliciously Black(Footnote 4), and Bill gets to bask in the same ethnic glory as they.
I do avoid “Colored,” not that it was ever one of my go-to words for much other than laundry. I don’t know how or why that term got demoted to a derogatory status notably below where “Black” sat in 1958, but it did.(Footnote 5) The NAACP is still around, though, bless them.
I like to think that I’ve reached a proper balance of true respect and linguistic social responsibility. I ask only one thing of my darker-hued brethren and sistren: If you ever feel the need to update the term of pride once more, please, not “ni**a!” I don’t think I can adjust that far.
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1: That other word was around, too. The one that has most of the same letters as “negro” but which is very definitely not. It’s not relevant this diatribe, however, so I mention it in passing only to prevent it from becoming a pachyderm behind the sofa.
2: I specify “relatively recent” because, ultimately, every human is of African descent.
3: See Footnote 2.
4: Many women and some men of my acquaintance would say the same about the Fifteenth Doctor.
5: I’m equally mystified how the word “Oriental,” as applied to people rather than carpets, came to be frowned, if not downright scowled, upon. I’ve never heard it used as anything but a neutral term and wonder if there was something going on beyond my hearing that I missed.