I can still remember when “colored” was the norm as well as when it became offensive and “black” became the new nonoffensive term.
In high school a black classmate described somebody else to me using that word and immediately apologized after saying it. I just thought it was a slightly odd situation- a black person apologizing to a white person for using a slur against black people.
I usually use black as a descriptor when mentioning race is relevant unless I’m speaking formally in which case I’ll usually use African American. I had one job where they preferred “darker skinned” to refer to anyone who was not white, so I followed their lead (most of management were not white themselves).
I have a book called Why Do All The Black Kids Sit Together In the Cafeteria** which is about race relations and the author indicates that she is generally fine with the terms “black” and “white” if nationality cannot be established, however she did have an anecdote from someone who said they dislike the term black because white people “say it with hate.” I’d have to read the book again to see if there was any elaboration on that such as the person who stated that coming from a very racist background or being from the Jim Crow South. Because otherwise that’s a little odd, but if anyone actually was offended by me saying “black” for that reason I’d feel terrible.
As an aside- I also knew someone when I was a teenager who objected to the term “Hispanic” as a descriptor of ethnicity because it “reeks of colonialism.” I was a little baffled by that as the individual in question had a name of Spanish origin and spoke Spanish- doesn’t that also “reek of colonialism”?
I guarantee no one has ever referred to me as a “European-American,” so I have little qualms about using the world “black.”
Oh, come now. Do you refuse to also identify a person in a group by their hair color? Physical characteristics are just and nothing to be ashamed of identifying. Stephen Colbert says, “I don’t see color” very tongue-in-cheek.
Here are two examples that I think demonstrate a reason to hang a label on someone that identifies them by skin color:
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Asking the question “Does a person who is _____ have the same chance of being hired by the XYZ Company as somebody who is white?”
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Making the statement “We want to be sure not to exclude people who are _____ from our board of directors.”
So, do you think these points should never be raised? Or do you think there is some other way of saying them?
I’ve told this story here before, but this reminds me of it again:
My old high-school job, my first job ever, was in a West Texas restaurant. It was a popular place, and the gimmick was that people would phone in their orders from the table. There was a telephone at each table, and just picking up the receiver would alert the counter that someone was phoning in. Quite a novelty back then.
We were a racially mixed crew, almost all high-school students, and almost all of the black employees were football players. Large football players. There was a dorky little white guy named Brett – I swear this was not me – who sometimes worked the counter. He took the phone orders. When he took an order, he’d write it down on a ticket and then pass it to the cooks while saying, “Order in.”
One evening, the crew mix happened to be Brett at the counter and an all-black crew of cooks. As Blacks are sometimes wont to do when clowning around amongst themselves, they were calling each other “nigger.” Brett, who had not a prejudiced bone in his body – and even if he did, he certainly would not try to antagonize beefy football players, seeing as he made even Woody Allen seem macho – got into the spirit of things by passing the tickets and calling, “Order in, nigger.” The cooks were cool with it, because they’d been throwing the N word around like water, and Brett was considered pretty cool, so no one took offense. They knew he was just trying to join in.
But Brett was a little clueless and did not quite know when to stop. Long after the joke stopped being funny, he was still passing the tickets in and going, “Order in, nigger.” They started telling him, “Uh, look, Brett, that’s okay, you don’t have to do that anymore. Joke’s over. Haha, but joke’s over now.” Brett, who was as clueless as the day was long, and this was summertime, so the days were pretty long, still didn’t get it and kept it up. Finally, one of these large football players cornered Brett in the back and popped him a little. Not hard, just enough to so he’d know it really was time for the joke to end.