Jesse Jackson wants to ban "N-word"

[Margaret Lee]

FWIW, this is an excerpt from a paper I wrote on the subject a few years ago:

  The shift from Black to African American occurred in 1988 when Dr. Ramona Edelin, President of the National Urban Coalition, proposed that the next year’s meeting be called, not the Black Summit, but the African American Summit. The purpose of this change was to reassess the condition of blacks in America while "linking Africans in North America with those on the Continent of Africa and  throughout the Diaspora "(Smitherman, in Mufwene et al., 1998, 213).

  Margaret Lee


Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
  The Reverend Jesse Jackson is the first and only person, except for a
few members of this list, that I know of to argue for the replacement
of "black" by "African-American." Well, I do know that the idea
replacing "black" with "African-African didn't spring full-blown from
the Reverend Jackson's forrid. Rather, he merely jumped upon the
bandwagon and made the concept his own. And I'm aware that there exist
other spokesmen for Black, uh, African-American America who have also
argued in favor of "African-American."nor do I have any idea of what their arguments are. Indeed, I'm
totally unaware even of the Reverend Jackson's arguments in favor of
"African-American," given that ignoring his and anyone else's
arguments, to quote Ike Turner, "was my plan from the ve'y beginnin'."

-Wilson



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