I’m telling Mom.
Yes, if you state something as fact, you should be able to provide a cite if asked for one – especially in Great Debates. (In this case, someone else provided one.) If you state that in your experience, something has been true, then a cite is not required but would be helpful. This is my opinion of SDMB tradition.
Thank you for bringing me up to date on the current preferences in capitalization of this truly black and white issue. You are a victor in the fight against ignorance.
When they say they are “sexist,” they are probably talking about the fact that you use one word for workers who have penises and another word for workers who have vaginas. No?
What word or words would you use to say the following:
“All _______________ will be expected to deliver the mail by 3:00 PM every day.”
or any other sentence which refers to all of the people who deliver the mail?
You can do it the hard way by having a lot of words. You can be backwards and inaccurate and make them all men. Or you can find something reasonable that describes all persons who carry mail. Something that won’t have anything to do with race, gender, or other irrelevant information.
What you call the individual person who brings your mail is up to you. But “Mail-maid” sounds too much like " milk-maid" to me. It disturbs my sinuses. That’s just my take.
No one here has criticized what people called others long ago. Mongoloid was a common term for a while until people learned about Down’s Syndrome. There are terms that we use now which will be considered rude and ignorant someday. Some of them will be immortalized on this message board.
But hadn’t you rather that we speak our truth whatever it is? Race may be more of an everyday factor in your life – as it is in Hippy’s life. I don’t think about my race much. When I was teaching and almost all of my students were black, I stopped thinking about their race. They were their personalities. The word black was not a distinguishing factor. I even absentmindedly complimented one of my lighter skinned students on the good tan that she had gotten over the summer when I saw her the second year.
As for the changes in the preferences for words to describe blacks, I have been through all of them during my lifetime. I was reprimanded for using the n-word. as a child, but the other changes came after that. I do remember that Southerners tended to say Negra rather than Negro. No insult was intended by that. My favorite has always been black because of the power associated with it. It was capitalized then. Pronouncing Negro correctly at a young age was the only problem I’ve had in making the adjustments.
I can’t believe that people actually have trouble making the adjustment.
I guess your class would have laughed at me, too - I fit everything I bolded there, but I don’t consider myself Black. Of course, I’m not White, either, and I’d bristle at either label as being incorrect for me.
I think the only time I ever actually heard the term “white” applied to me was a comment on my spastic arrythmia, which I would like to think of as “dancing”. If anyone would let me.
Lower-case “white” was just a descriptor–the vaguely not-quite-accurate indicator of the lightness or darkness of skin tone. No one refers to the White snow on the ground or the White sand on the beach. This was the standard used in the newspapers. (My memory was that when colored was used to identify people whose ancestors in the U.S. had been slaves, the word “colored” was similarly not capitalized, but I am not sure how easy it would be to provide a citation, quickly.) When the newspapers began making an effort to grant blacks a bit more dignity, they began using Negro. It was capitalized because it was taken from (and corresponded to) the scientific nomenclature that used Negro and Caucasian. However, newspapers very rarely referred to “Caucasians” in their typical stories. If they noted the race of a person of European descent, they used the more familiar “white.” In the discussions that took place in the late 1960s over how they would prefer to be identified, “black” beat out Afro-American, African-American, Person of Color, and Negro using the argument that they wanted to be known on an equal footing with the white majority. Since lower-case “white” identified that majority, lower-case “black” as a simple color descriptor corresponded most closely to the term used for the European-descended majority.
(Interestingly, the same argument was used in 1989 by Jesse Jackson and his group pushing for a change to “African-American”: his group had assembled from Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and other rust-belt cities where there is a very strong recognition of the various ethinc communities. It is slowly fading, but there has long been a tradition within those metropolitan areas of refering to Irish-Americans, Italian-American, Polish-Americans, etc. and the intent was to have the black cultural community identified in a way that was more similar to their neighbors. (Since the "hyphenated-American"terminology is less prevalent in rural areas or in the South and West, the choice was still a bit problematic, but it was not a random idea thrown out to change for change’s sake.)
I guess I really don’t believe people when they say they’re colorblind. People can distinguish fat people from skinny people, tall from short, and blondes from brunettes, and I’m supposed to believe that can’t see that my skin is darker than theirs? I guess in my way of thinking, a person who says they don’t see color is saying that they have averted their eyes to the way I look. I don’t want them to have to pretend that I’m like them in order for them to like me.
Not that my way of thinking is accurate. It may be my own cynicism that keeps me from believing in a truly “colorblind” individual.
She knows. Besides, I’m her brother, too. 
Sorry. I never lend to family, unless I never want to see them again. I like you, so no loans. 
Honestly, that sounds like a perfect illustration of monstro’s point. You didn’t see an individual student. You were so “color blind” that you started absentmindedly assuming everyone was like you. It’s definitely better than putting on a pointy hood or saying “I’m not racist but…” but it’s also ignoring people’s identities for the sake, in many cases, of a sort of artificial togetherness.
If I have to imagine that monstro is white (or simply “not black”) in order to treat her fairly then I’m not really treating monstro fairly at all. I’m treating a construct of monstro fairly–a fictional person.
Booker T. Washington was simply the Reconstruction-Era Martin Luther King - lot of talk, poor ideas, and a desire to appease whites than to fruitfully integrate blacks into society. I suggest you read Souls of Black Folk and Blackwater written around the same time by a fella named W.E.B Dubois.
Now, I personally find the terms to describe blacks are simply inadequate.
Negro: If we’re using 18th century terms, how come we don’t use “Caucausian” or “Mongoloid” to describe whites and asians, respectively? Can we? Can we?
Black: Most blacks aren’t black, they are some shade of brown. Indeed, blacks, especially African-Americans range from being very pigmented like Don Cheadle to being white (or nearly so) like Mariah Carey or Jada Pinkett.
African-American: I (begrudgingly) like this term the best but whites don’t like using it, so what can you do?
Person of Color: This is to describe not just African-Americans but all non-whites.
Colored: :smack: It’s 2008.
- Honesty
Not sure if you meant to, but you’ve grossly mischaracterized MLK by associating him with a desire to “appease whites”. I hope that was a typo on your part.
I might be close to being one as well.
About four years ago, or shortly after I moved here, I got into a scuffle with two gentlemen who were politely looting the crap out of the property I owned right next to the one I still inhabit. Bothered me just a tiny bit as you might imagine. Because blows were exchanged and some blood flowed the ‘law’ here decided it was worth it to get involved.
Long story short. At the pre-hearing for the trial I was asked to describe the gents. First thing that came to mind about the first was that he was rather short, young, skinny and was missing his left hand. Pretty observant of me I though for a minute, for just how many short-young-skinny-one-hand-chopped-off (left one to be precise) at-the-wrist are walking around in this city? Apparently, many, for I was asked about the guy’s color. Ok, that wasn’t too hard either. The guy was pretty obviously black, so I said as much. And that’s when all the problems started for I was being asked to describe his exact shade of blackness. And that was just the beginning for when it came to the second perp things only went downhill. Guy was short as well, but quite stocky (some body-building evident in his built) and had light eyes. Color? To this day (and having seen him again at trial) I haven’t a clue! Guy was light-skinned-yet-not-quite-white was all I could muster. And the judge (female) kept making my feel more and more embarrassed as she pressed on with the issue by pointing at a number of people in her office – from her scribe, to her assistant all the way to some guy that was just sitting there (?) and crowning the whole affair by pointing at herself (while telling me she was at the beach over the weekend!) and then, me! – as per her own words, a ‘truly’ white person.
I wanted to dig a hole and bury myself in it for I don’t recall being so embarrassed for other people in my life. Though being the smart-ass that I am I asked, with a certain irritating sarcasm to my voice, for a “human color-chart” instead. Which got some laughs though certainly not from her.
Lesson learned: Don’t beat-up on anyone who isn’t clearly Black or White. Or take a course in human coloring.
Seriously though, to this day when I think back on it I’m still WTFucking about the whole thing.
Mariah Carey is white? Gosh, she sure looks beige and pink to me. It’s kinda funny to me that you object to “black” because most blacks aren’t black, but the word “white” is apparently unobjectionable for the same reason.
I figure it’s understood that both terms are meant to refer to where someone is along the spectrum of human skin color, and even then are more metaphorical than anything else (since Arnold Scharzenegger, a white dude, is clearly farther toward the dark end of that spectrum than Ms. Carey is.)
Daniel
Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from pictures-- especially pictures of celebrities. Put them in the same lighting conditions without make-up, and I doubt you’d come to the same conclusion.
He mischaracterized Booker T. Washington to start with. To characterize Washington as a man who just had “lots of talk, poor ideas” and was interested only in appeasing white people is just completely at odds with the facts. The man worked his entire life to advance the education of black people; far from being “lots of talk” he was, in fact, a man of action. Criticizing him for concentating on education and not on civil rights protests is like criticizing Louis Pasteur for concentrating on biology and not on physics, or discounting the accomplishments of George Washington because he didn’t do much for literature.
That some people wanted him to take a harder line is true, but it’s nuts to claim he just spend his life sweet-talking white folks.
To suggest it of Martin Luther King Jr. is plainly insane, of course.
Arnold may have been wearing makeup there, too. Nonetheless, while I may have been sloppy in my examples, I’m guessing you’d agree with my point, which is that some folks whom we identify as white are darker-skinned than some folks whom we identify as black?
Daniel
Actually, my comment about make-up was directed more at Arnold. 
No doubt.
Similarly, just the other day I was watching Obama give a speech, and it all of the sudden occurred to me how light his skin is. Despite his near-perfect 50/50 racial heritage, almost everyyone in the US would consider him Black on sight. That’s the way race works in the US. But if you actually consider where his skin shade falls on a real black-to-white color chart, it’s probably on the white half.
So, when we classify people as “Black” or “White”, we’re obviously not doing that according to some objective color standard, but rather we’re looking at a suite of physical characteristics, and then putting someone in a category that is allegedly about skin color, even if it isn’t an internally inconsistent one wrt skin color.
You didn’t read my post carefully. You said that I didn’t see an individual student. I said, “When I was teaching and almost all of my students were black, I stopped thinking about their race. They were their personalities..” You can’t get much more individualized than that.
There was no “artificial togetherness.” They are like me. I am like them. What we have in common far outweighs the differences. If you don’t get that, then you are hungup on “race” as their identity.
You know nothing of my involvement in the lives of these young people for twenty years.
Monstro, I don’t know how to respond to your answer except that I wish it weren’t so. You know a side of me that others don’t.
I know what you said. If you don’t want what you said used as an example, don’t say it.
And yes, it is artificial togetherness when you “absentmindedly” start assuming black students have tans just like white people. A person’s individuality is everything about them, not just the things about them that make you comfortable or make them similar to you. A person’s individuality includes their skin and their hair and their eye color and their heritage and their culture and their home life and their siblings and their parents, not just things that you can relate to or that you understand or that they share with you.
What we all look like tends to be important to most of us. We don’t want to be faceless and indistinguishable. Well, I do when I go to the gynecologist or something, but otherwise no. I want to be seen for who I am, the whole package, not just be so like someone else that our differences are ignored or hidden.
I think that is a key point. Most of us White folks don’t have a lot of interaction with Blacks-- at least not as much as we have with other Whites. And so you tend to always notice when someone is Black. But if you’re in a situation where there are lots of Blacks, then I can see where you could be become “colorblind”. It’s just too common to notice.
No typo. If you want to discuss it, send me an email or start a thread. I don’t want to hijack the OP’s thread.
- Honesty