return of "colored"

Amy West medievalist at W-STS.COM
Fri Mar 30 13:58:41 UTC 2012


On 3/30/12 12:00 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
> Date:    Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:28:54 -0400
> From:    Laurence Horn<laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject: Re: return of "colored"
>
> On Mar 29, 2012, at 9:49 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
>> >  Once trendy? Once trendy?
> Well, it*was*  once trendy; doesn't mean it can't have retrended.  As the late Mitch Hedberg was fond of pointing out, "I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to too."
>
> As for "person of color", I was surprised to see it invoked in a letter written (possibly by John Quincy Adams, I forget) on view in a museum exhibition on the Amistad case, from 1840 or earlier.
>
> LH
>
>
>
>

If I remember correctly, it was a legal designation in some statutes/law
codes of the period.


--
---Amy West

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