author Stanley Crouch
Posted on 06/03/2004 5:17:32 AM PDT by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
Some people are particularly disturbed by my use of the word Negro as opposed to the latest fashionable label. I am not bothered by such people, but I am disturbed by the reliance on cosmetic identity that has become so important to black people over the last 35 or 40 years.
More than a few people were actually taken in by the obsession with naming that came out of the Nation of Islam, when Malcolm X, chief heckler for Elijah Muhammad, inspired many to begin responding to the word "Negro" as if it were the dirtiest of insults.
The argument was that "Negro" separated black people from their African identity. It did not acknowledge the greatness of Africa, wonderful Africa, that lost paradise where everything was perfect. It did not recognize that black people had not always been slaves - that they were, in fact, a separate nation descended from kings and queens.
Hmm. No one, of course, ever considered that if most of the millions of black Americans really were descended from kings and queens, one would have needed a lot more land than Africa provided to support all that royalty. Millions of kingdoms definitely present a challenge.
It was, at best, cult thinking. But it was also a way of getting people to think of themselves as perpetual victims who were oppressed at every turn. That seems to me the greatest impact of believing that the history connected to the name Negro was all second-class travail and injustice.
Some 40 years ago, Malcolm X said: "You're not an American, you're a victim of Americanism."
That's too crude and simpleminded. But the crude and simpleminded are not unusual when the subject is the Negro. While such statements might sound good on a podium, they miss a great and substantial truth.
Black Americans have had an enormous impact on American history. Almost every important effort to better the position of people in this nation has its roots in the Negro-American story. Consider the history of the labor movement, for one.
Being called something other than Negro will not better the state of the people who now walk around challenging others to call them African-Americans. They think that to be proud and effective, people with dark skins of a certain pedigree need to know they are connected to the grandeur of Africa, the fountain of civilization. Hogwash.
Clearly, knowing that they are Africans has done nothing special for Africans themselves, as we can see in the massacres in Rwanda during the 1990s, the many brutal African dictatorships and the abundance on the continent of backward ideas about women, slavery and a number of other things.
People can call themselves whatever they want. But the challenges facing this nation and its darker ethnic group will not be solved by anything other than deep thinking and hard work. Pride comes from accomplishment. Cosmetic nonsense will not get it.
author Stanley Crouch
Negroe is Retro.
They want to be called Black, so what's wrong with the Latin word for black?
ping
Yes! I use the word Negro too. My lefty friend and I were just talking about how Mr. Crouch and I both use this word. I'll have to send her this piece, lol.
And I'll mention to her another hearing of this, listening to NPR the other day, the host had Mario Van Peebles and his dad Melvin on to talk about Mario's new movie about the making of the Dad's old movie. Dad was late, but the son said "We don't need to wait for that negro..."
Vocabularic vindication, yet again.
Brilliant find. Such true words. I wonder what Stanleys toughts are on the Confederate Battle Flag. I bet he realizes it is a Flag.
Hey, they call me caucasian and I`m not even asian or cork.
The first part is most definitely true. And I reject the term "Negro" as much as I do the term "African-American."
Calling me an American will do just fine, thank you very much.
"Clearly, knowing that they are Africans has done nothing special for Africans themselves..."
That is the problem in the first place. They are not Africans. Regardless of how their ancestors arrived here, they were born here. You don't here Jamaicans or Haitians calling themselves African-Jamaicans, or African-Haitians, do you? This is clearly another form of ignorant American political correctness.
I happen to be white, and American. I could care less where my ancestors originated. I am proud to be an American.
"There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation of all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities." [Teddy Roosevelt in a speech before the Knights of Columbus]
I can almost hear Stanley talking to me at lunch saying, "Bianco, pass the Pinot Grigio.".
Yes, why is "people of color" acceptable nowadays, but "colored people" isn't? And why has no one informed the NAACP?
There was a great Feiffer cartoon on this subject, years ago in the village voice. It's got to be almost 20 years ago that it ran, and this silly, pointless, controversy still continues.
And, as a lily-white, blue-eyed devil, I will now start referring to myself as an 'Uncolored Person.'
^5 !
And when asked on a form to "select race," I won't until I see the box for "Human Race."
Since the early part of the 20ieth Century,
Colored to Negro to Afro-American to African-American to Black to 'People of Color.'
Full circle with a slight revision.
I am so tired of this topic.
Black people have changed their label at least six times since I was a kid. [Colored, Negro, Black, Afro-American, African American, People of Color]
And now they want to go back to Negro?
I give up.
Individual
If I'm not mistaken theres still an American negro college fund.
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