McWhorter on "Negro" [Was: on "Negro English"]

[Victor Steinbok]

Since I was only born in the 60s and was not even in the country until
the 80s, I can't say much about the use back then. But I do have a
question. Is there some differentiation in use between "colored" and
"coloreds"? In particular, I am wondering if using the aggregate term
might have been offensive even when using the individual description was
not.

     VS-)

On 1/18/2010 1:03 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> I may have been more sensitive to nuance than most (look how I ended up),
> and some of this sense may be the reuslt of autosuggestion, but I  believe
> that many middle-class white people in NYC *may* have felt uneasy about
> using "colored" in conversation with "Negroes," regardless of what Negroes
> said among themselves and despite the existence of the National Association
> for the Advancement of Colored People, the paradigm example of the term's
> general innocuousness.
>
> Nonetheless, as Bill suggests, _colored_ was not an objectionable term _per
> se_. For my grandparents (born in the 1880s), it was the usual word, used as
> both adjective and noun.
>
> My impression, based, of course, only on edited publications, is that
> _darky_, whatever its connotations, was historically more common in the
> slave states and postbellum South than it was up North.
>
> I do recall that NYC papers up to about 1963-64 (after the Civil Rights
> March) routinely identified black criminal suspects and crime victims as
> "Negro" and perhaps "colored" (hazy here). The practice ended
> suddenly, often with an editorial statement explaining that the paper had
> never thought of it as offensive, but was now persuaded otherwise. The "N"
> of "Negro" had been capitalized in print for a generation: ISTR that in _The
> American Language_ Mencken (evidently a condescending
> paternalist) implicitly scoffed at the idea that any change was needed.
>
> I believe the NYC papers would also identify the ethnicity of Asian
> Americans in similar circumstances as "Chinese," "Japanese," "Korean,"
> etc. If so, that endedt too, unless the ethnicity was clearly germane to
> the events reported.
>
> Obviously a historian of journalism is needed to discuss such matters (and
> I'm sure they have already). But these personal recollections (or what seem
> to be recollections) may be of some interest to modern youth.
> (Another antiquated phrase.)
>
> JL

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