African-American seems to have been used as far back as the 1860s. “Negro” is just archaic at this point, and insulting to some people. Most accurately, you could call the people you’re referring to “Sub-saharan Africans” or “West Africans”. It just seems that if you don’t want the thread turned into a hijack on language, you shouldn’t use a term like “negro”, which is provocative, and frankly, your insistance on the term seems to reveal your biases.
As far as I know, it is people of predominantly European descent in America who have a problem with the word “Negro” which as I understand is a word from the Spanish language referring to the colour black.
A quick check on google using the word “negro” will get you
Negro League Baseball
National Council of Negro Women
United Negro College Fund
National Association of Negro Musicians
Universal Negro Improvement Association
and a book by none other than Martin Luthor King Jr., entitled “The Negro and the Constitution”. Furthermore, he describes his own people as negro in his most famous speech ,“I have a dream”
This is not the same as the infamous “N” word which understandably although used by blacks is considered an affront when used by whites.
During the sixties, this issue came up, and the term “African-American” was born (or reborn), but since then I have heard several African-American who have stated they have no problem with the label in question.
I would like to hear from some one in the black community on this issue.
Though I am not horribly well informed on the issue, it looks like to me that many of those organizations could have started BEFORE the term started getting phased out of the generally accepted speech, and the organizations in question simply never bothered to change their name.
You could be right, grienspace, but every nice, quiet, middle-class, black professional with whom I have worked would gently suggest black if they were referred to as Negro. (A very few younger ones would insist on African-American, but most of them also expressed a preference for black.)
As Netbrian has noted, all those organizations were founded years before the 1960s and most have kept the name to avoid discontinuity when seeking funds.
Just wanted to drop in and mention that, while by far the majority of New World slaves were bought from their “fellow” Africans who had enslaved them, there were cases where the white slavers conducted their own slave raids. During John Hawkins’ historic slaving voyage to the West Indies, his flagship the Jesus of Lubeck was stocked in large part by slave raids on the Guinea Coast and the Bight of Benin. Also, before he turned pirate, Henry Every was a professional slaver who captured many of his slaves himself. In a grim irony, many of his victims were themselves African slavers who had come to sell slaves to him and found themselves packed aboard Every’s ship along with the slaves they had intended to sell to him!
These incidents were rare exceptions to the rule because they were so risky to the white slavers; the African villagers could and did fight back ferociously, and even more dangerous were Africa’s native diseases, to which the whites had little resistance. Buying slaves from the locals was much safer.
The idea of Americans (including black Americans descended from slaves!!!) paying reparations to the descendants of those who sold them strikes me as absurd. If anyone is due reparations, it ought to be the black people in the Americas who are descended from the victims of the trade, not African governments led by the descendants of African slavers who profited from this obscene trade in human beings as much as the white slavers did.
tomndebb- Are you saying that black people are not negroes. Yes or No?
If No, which race of people are classified as the negro race?
I’m not trying to start any crap here, but I wont back down. You people are trying to tell me that there is not a negro race. I know damn well that there is. Just as I know that there’s a caucasion race. Perhaps modern day propaganda has convinced many people that there are no races, but I know what people used to be classified as. Theres no shame in being a member of any particular race.
Well, its 10:00 left coast time, and Mrs Stoner is beckoning me to bed. Thanks for keeping all your posts cordial, and I’ll back tomorrow to show you the error of your ways.
Is mitochondrial DNA research “modern day propaganda”?
Yes there is something resembling a “Caucasian race”. You’ll find it in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, and in some adjacent areas of Russia, Turkey, and Iran. The exact traits of this race aren’t that well defined (maybe a propensity for dark wavy hair and prominent noses?). What they have with slavery, I have no clue.
“Caucasacoid”, “Mongoloid” and “Negroid” pretty much went out once DNA was discovered and clines were discovered. But this debate has gone on in other posts.
Black people used to be called that way. The term is now considered as derogatory, at least in the US, and you know it perfectly well. You want to make a point, but would you call a friend born from a single mother “bastard” to make a similar point?
None. The concept of negroID (but since negroid would sounds weird but not offensive, it’s no fun to use it, is it?)race isn’t considered as having any scientific value, because it can’t be defined . Casually, the concept of race is still used to differenciate between people whose skin has a different color and who have different facial features. People who have a (very) dark skin (the level of darkness required varying widely depending on the country…say Brazil and the US) are refered to as blacks.
I don’t know if you were trying, but you succeded quite well…
You should
You got it.
You should know better.
Could you enlighten us and give us your scientific definition of a race (any race will do)?
You’re right on the money. USED TO.
There is no shame in being a bastard, either. Are you?
I am saying that race is a cultural expression. There are people in this world who have darker or lighter skin and people who have different hair textures and facial features and all that. Looking at those differences in appearance, a number of early scientists categorized people according to those appearnces and called upon the older term “race” (that had originally meant all the people descended from one ancestor) as a label to use to identify those characteristics. Beginning with Linnaeus (I know of no one prior to him) in the eighteenth century, we have have different people set up three or five or more categories of these “races” into which we place different people based on their appearance. One set of categories included Caucasian, Negroid, and Mongoloid. A different method of categories added new categories into which people from the Pacific Islands and people from the Americas could be dropped. As more information was discovered through the 19th and 20th centuries, discovering more apparent differences among groups of people, other people came up with as many as 60 “races.”
Beginning in the 1970s, several biologists set out to definitively identify what we knew about human populations. They kept coming back with confusing information through the 70s and 80s that made it difficult to separate humans into large groups. Finally, in the early 1990s, enough genetic material had been collected and analyzed from people across the entire globe, that the evidence became overwhelming that there was no way to identify any person by “race” using genetic material. Humans were too much alike to be divided into races, biologically.
At the same time, several studies undertaken on bone structure and other physical features showed that in areas that were supposed to be borders between one “race” and another, there was no dividing line. All the features of individual people simply merged into those of their neighbors from one side of the “border” to the other. Other examinations of skeletal remains showed that where we expected “borders” to have arisen recently, the same blending and merging of characteristics could be found going back tens of thousands of years.
Note that none of this involved politics or political correctness. In fact, the primary geneticist who is driving these studies has had money stripped from his budget by Politically Correct people who do not want information published showing that one ethnic group or another is not “pure.”
We are left with the conclusion that races are simply appearances that are misinterpreted. From that perspective, there is clearly no Negro race, no Caucasian race, and no Mongoloid race. They have no biological reality.
They do exist in cultural definitions. Certainly, the typical person from Nigeria looks sufficiently different than a person from the typical person from England (which made it easy for an American of English ancestry to spot any slave who had been imported from Africa). No one is claiming that everyone “looks alike.” What biology has shown is that there are no biological differences among all the people on this planet that would allow us to identify any group biologically by race. Therefore, since science (not politics) no longer recognizes a difference between Europeans and Africans and East Asians that can be tagged with a label such as Caucasian or Negro or Mongol, there is no point in using those outmoded terms.
There are people on islands Southwest of Burma and others in the Pacific who can be easily confused with Africans, even though they are more closely related to the Chinese. There are people in Northern Japan who have European appearances, although they have no connection to Europe. Appearances are misleading. They tend to arise from the body reponding to local conditions of climate, regardless of genetic affinity. Using appearances to identify a person’s biological “race” makes no sense because of the high probability of error.
I certainly do not deny the cultural reality of race. Europeans specifically selected sub-Saharan Africans to be slaves because they looked sufficiently different to make it difficult for them to escape since they could not blend in with a crowd of other people. People from the Pacific coasts of China and Japan look sufficiently similar to a European that two idiots in Detroit in the 80s beat a Chinese man to death because they thought he was one of “those Japanese that are putting us out of work.”
Granting that one can identify a person by their culturally defined race, however, indicates that one should use the culturally accepted terms for that race. Currently, the term with the widest acceptance in North America for dark-skinned people from Africa is black, not Negro.
If you wish to join the Politically Correct people who are trying to hang onto the outmoded (and erroneous) scientific terms, I suppose that you can, but you will draw comments on this Forum which is not particularly PC.
Again I call your attention to the several discussions on the subject that have been collected on the Reality of Race web site/
If you took a couple minutes and did a few searches, you’d see that it’s been shown again and again that there is no such thing as negros, caucasions, etc.
Those slave-traders were pursuing a myth no more real than the fountain of youth or the tooth-fairy.
Ahhh… hearing the pages of S.J. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man turning frantically.
Gene, I think that the point you are missing (and it’s a shame, because it’s causing a lot of thread drift - including this post - in a discussion that would otherwise have good potential) is that the concept of “race” is a shaky one at best. I do believe that - as was mentioned by other posters - there is no scientific evidence that demonstrates that human beings can be divided into groups known as “races.” There is a general tendency for the skin colour of people to be darker when they come from places near the Equator, but no races per-se.
So, saying that you’re using a correct term to refer to members of a given race is a contradiction.
My 3.7 cents Canadian.
walor here. Proud to be from Hull (UK), the birthplace of William Wilberforce. You may find some info about modern slavery here www.childlabor.net/.
I watched a TV programme here in the UK fairly recently which followed a small group of individuals who were trying to ‘buy’ freedom for present day slaves in Africa. It was controvertial and difficult to watch without becoming just a little tearful!
Slavery is still a reality for thousands of people.
Back again. I think I’ll save the " Is there such a thing as the negro race" argument for another post. I’m sorry that so many people focused on my use of the word “negro”, instead of the questions in the OP. Since the word offends so many people, I wont use it here anymore.
My guess is that the African “slavers who profited from the slave trade” represented the thinnest slice of western African societies at that time. In some ways, the slave trade can be likened to the illegal drug trade today. Yes, drug dealers can make a bundle, but their actions have ruinous consequences for the larger community in which they operate–and this was true of the slave trade.
Another guess is that any reparations paid by the U.S., the Caribbean and South American nations would be siphoned off and squandered by the corrupt political elite of western Africa. And once the money is gone, the aftermath of slavery will still persist.
Right. But the exact same thing could be said of the effect of slavery in the Continental United States and the Caribbean; it produced huge riches for a small elite of planters, but was economically devastating to the South as a whole, locking the slave states in a poor manorial economy while the North marched onward into the Industrial Revolution and development. The South has still not caught up with the North economically. Should Africa pay the Americans reparations for something our ancestors did to themselves? No, says I, and neither should we pay reparations to the Africans for something their ancestors did to themselves. The slaves were the true victims, and their descendants are all over here in the Americas. (Except for a handful in Liberia).
I had a problem with the tone of the last paragraph of the OP, and I don’t think anyone has addressed it strongly enough.
The fact that Group A did [insert bad thing] to Group B, with the help of some members of Group B, does not absolve Group A of guilt.
Correct me if I am wrong, but you seem to be implying that because Africans played a role in the slave trade, they have no right to point the finger at others
Apologies, but bibliophage has suggeted that this particular subject is best discussed in this thread rather than the GQ number of folks died in the Middle Passage thread.
Else thanks to the others for handling our ‘Stoner,’ I rather look forward to his future arguments for a ‘negro’ race. In re greeny old man, I simply suggest he by himself a ticket to NYC and walk around Brooklyn refering to folks as Negro. I am sure it would be, ahem, an enlightening if perhaps challenging experience.
In reply to Sailor
*Yes[/] and you will note I used the phrase contemporary observers, meaning contempory to the trade. It is disingenous and utterly unsupportable to imply that much of the shipping did not appear horrid and immoral even by the rather low standards of the time. That is addressed rather more factually in the other thread.
You might do better following the other citations cited, but of course the slave traders, European, Eurafrican or African were not happy to see a generally profitable enterprise go away. That does not ipso facto apply to the ‘host’ societies on either end. Your frames of reference are showing a bit of gerrymandering.
Two nations with rather nasty ethno-racial problems, Mauretania and the Sudan, I dislike this general Africa refernce as it falsely implies something not supported.
I object to this also, as it is usually utterly ahistorical and tinged with racism, but I did not note that in the thread in question.
Blacks, whites. Blinkered bloody thinking.
Tamerlane has noted the fallaciousness of this in part, but for the record, white Europeans --presuming that we are counting the Venetians and the Genoans as white of course-- gleefully sold white (and other) North Africans, fellow (white) European Xtians and generally Slavs into slavery all through the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. Of course the early instigators of this trade indeed were Nordic invaders but later on (white) Rus elites happily sold subjets into slavery etc.
And then we dovetail into Tamerlane’s observations on the trade, moreover I noted already that there were African societies opposed to the trade (and some non-slaving holding). We can add to this black American abolotionists. In short, only ignorance of the history of the slavery can support such a statement. I refer you to Orlando Patterson’s History of Social Death for a masterful global survey of slavery and its history. In full objectivity.