Re: Colored people (Re: Hellary, return the cups...)

"Boracay Bill" <boracaybill@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

One of the moving-target PC-ness terminology revisions in US-English
had the phrase "person of color" as the PC term for blacks and browns,
or perhaps it was for non-whites in general. That might have been
sometime around the early '70s -- I haven't been keeping track. At
various times, I recall the accepted PC term for Blacks (is "Black"
the current PC term?) variously as Colored, Negro, Black, Afro-
American, Person of Color, African-American, Black (again), and
probably a few others which I have forgotten.

Okay, lemme proffer a little historical perspective from one who has <
lived thru this period.

(I'll use the word Negro as the baseline, even though it was never
really used in day-to-day conversation during my ancient lifetime.)

In the US, the term "black" originally denoted someone of purely Negro
racial origin, whereas Negroes with white blood were called "colored".

Negro society in the US was stratified by skin color. Those with the
lightest skin were at the top of the food chain and those with the
darkest skin were at the bottom. In such a race-conscious society,
these distinctions were taken quite seriously and nowhere more than in
Negro society. For instance, a light-skinned woman would not normally
marry a black-skinned man and those women who did were considered to
have "married down".

Hence the following gem, which I first heard in the '40s and which was
commonly quoted in Negro circles:
If you're white, you're all right.
If you're yellow, you're mellow.
If you're brown, stick aroun'.
If you're black, stand back!

Thus, those with the darkest skin were at the very bottom of the totem
pole and to actually call someone black was considered impolite, if
not downright insulting, as it also denoted they belonged to the
lowest social stratum. The polite term (this was long before the term
"Politically Correct" was even coined) to use for all people with any
amount of Negro blood was colored.

These designations began fading away in the '60s with the rise of the
"Black Pride" movement. It was argued that these color-based societal
distinctions were actually quite harmful and served to separate people
of Negro heritage rather than unite them in their fight for racial
equality. This concept was gradually accepted and all people of Negro
ancestry began to be referred to in the US as black.

Ob cors, the whole nonsense has since morphed into a wide range of
terms by which Negroes are termed ..... at least in polite circles. (I
personally use only the term black.)

I've always whinsically smiled at the thought of a bunch of the
so-called black leadership all together late at nite, drunk and
stoned, laughing and slapping their thighs as they propose new and
even yet more complicated terms to force the whiteman to call them
..... such as the the multi-syllabic tongue-twister African-American.

LeeBat
may you live in interesting times .....


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