Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/19/its-not-ok-to-use-the-term.html
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Incidentally this is also one of the key reasons that people who make false equivalencies defending celebrations of “white culture” are full if crap.
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Yeah, if I wanted to, I could trace my entire lineage back to Ireland and back beyond that.
Many Black Americans can’t do similar. They were kidnapped, enslaved and family ties deliberately broken. There is no comparison (even for people whose Irish ancestors were indentured servants… no, they were not the same as slaves).
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Yes, even possessing the knowledge of where your ancestors came from is an indication they weren’t robbed of their identities and culture the same way enslaved Africans were. Black people didn’t even get to keep their names, let alone their families or their culture.
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I already do.
Until “race” no longer matters, I capitalize them all.
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Black with a capital B refers to people of the African diaspora.
Interesting, as I’ve seen a lot of people use “Black” to refer to not just the African diaspora, but universally to all dark-skinned people with similar experiences (e.g. who were “otherized” by their skin color and thus put in a distinct class of people subject to horrific racism). E.g. Indigenous Australians, Indian Dalits, etc. Perhaps it’s a non-American usage…
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Like everything else with the Black community, it varies.
Many Black folks see all dark complected peoples as Black, even if that’s not how those people see themselves.
Then there are Black folks who only refer to people of African descent as Black… but that gets even more complicated, because genetically speaking, all of humanity is originally of African descent.
Do you also think “Mongoloid” is a “proper term?”
I don’t know where you’ve been for the last several decades, but words like Colored, Negro and Negroid are archaic and deeply rooted in racial bigotry- they aren’t used any more in civilized society because their negative connotations make them inherently offensive.
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I’m probably preaching to the choir, but I want to at least express this if for my own understanding.
My distance European ancestors were probably enslaved at one time. Under a very different social system. And a key difference is that my social position today is not based on my ancestor’s status.
Right now, our current social system still recognizes institutions of slavery in monuments, names of places, revered men, and works of literature. And people continue to be assigned a different social status at birth according to the color of their skin. A status deeply attached to a recent history of enslaved ancestors.
We should be angry, very very angry.
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Caucasian, Negriod and Mongoliod are all outdated terms first introduced by the Göttingen School of History in the 18th century based on a pseudo-scientific racism that at once perpetuated the racist idea that race is a biologically intrinsic and not a social construct, and erased the history of brown people in Europe.
It’s as wrong and as bad as eugenics, and was in fact part of the basis for Nuremberg Race Laws.
You are advised and requested not to use them. You may have noticed that questionnaires asking participants race increasingly use the word White where they once used the word Caucasian. Apparently no everyone got the memo.
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One of the greatest things that we’re getting out of this Black Lives Matters, besides entire police departments cleaned out and racial equality actually getting real attention, is that people are pretty much just showing their whole ass on the “I’m a racist” front. I mean, normally we’d have to look for systemic and subtle racism and then excise you from our lives/communities/etc and we’d get grief because of the paradox of tolerance and the whole “But excluding racists is the real racism” bullshit… but now, you just identify yourself and make it SO EASY to flag and ignore/block.
And it’s happening all over the place, too. My twitter and other social media streams have never been this free of assholes.
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Right?
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Maybe we should throw in that you can drop the term “Indian” in Canada, though it hasn’t died out yet in the States. “Indigenous” is a mouthful, I know…
Also, we have the “U” in a lot of words, so it’s “Persons of Colour”. Thanks to Aidy Bryant on SNL, this is now known to rhyme with “tour”.
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Not trying to make excuses for the racist assholery, but I’m genuinely wondering if a lack of familiarity with English may be a factor in this? My Spanish is pretty bad, and I’m sure that I occasionally (fortunately so far apparently hilariously) have said some pretty idiotic/offensive things.
(An example: Once when backpacking in Mexico, I tried to use my School Only Spanish to ask if a grocery store had milk. I asked a nice cashier lady, who thought it was funny that I, struggling to ask my question, apparently asked if she personally had milk (as in possessing anatomically) rather than asking if there was milk in the store… oops.)
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Right; modern understanding of human genetics has shown that there’s actually more genetic variation between different populations within sub-saharan Africa than there is between (say) a “White” European population and an East Asian population. Which makes sense when you realize that different groups of humans migrated to different regions of Africa long before humans left the African continent to differentiate into the other phenotypes we see around the world today.
Bottom line: anyone who tries to tell you there’s a scientific basis for lumping all subsaharan African people into a single “race” is full of shit no matter what terminology they use, but ESPECIALLY if they use long-deprecated terms like “negroid.”
Social construct, not biological.
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Had a similar experience in Italy regarding “anno” vs “ano.” And taking awhile to figure out why people kept asking my age then cracking up.
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Blak: a term used by some Aboriginal people to reclaim historical, representational, symbolical, stereotypical and romanticised notions of Black or Blackness. Often used as ammunition or inspiration. This type of spelling may have been appropriated from American hip-hop or rap music.
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In Spanish, “mi papa tiene 80 anos” means “my potato has 80 buttholes”. And mama means breast.
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Obligs:
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Dang it, I spent at least a half an hour looking for a Word jpeg or gif, and all my Google-fu would come up with is the Microsoft product.
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