Naming a Minority

“Finding a Proper Name to Call Black Americans” by Randall Kennedy, in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (Winter 2004–2005), 200 W. 57th St., New York, N.Y. 10019.

It’s one of the most sensitive questions in America today: What’s the proper way to refer to the nation’s second-largest minority group?

In colonial times, freed blacks gravitated toward “African.” But after the American Colonization Society was launched in 1816 by whites seeking to move freed blacks to Africa, that label lost its appeal. And most freed slaves and other blacks born in the United States considered themselves Americans, notes Kennedy, a Harvard law professor and noted commentator on racial matters. There was a pronounced shift toward use of the term “colored.”

Not all black leaders felt it was proper to worry over the question of labels. The black abolitionist William Whipper protested that race-based nomenclature created an “odious distinction” between people of European ancestry and people of African ancestry. “Whipper proposed using a political distinction such as ‘oppressed Americans,’” reports Kennedy. But other abolitionists rejected Whipper’s criticisms. By 1854, the National Emigration Convention of Colored People was drawing up a resolution that “Negro, African, Black, Colored and Mulatto” would carry the same token of respect when applied to blacks as “Caucasian, White, Anglo-Saxon, and European” when applied to whites.

Later in the century, “Negro” began emerging as the preferred term, particularly among black intellectuals such as Booker T. Washington. Derived from “niger,” the Latin word for black, the term drew fire  because it was uncomfortably close to “nigger,” which “had become by the early 19th century a term of extreme disparagement.”

For two decades The New York Times  lowercased “negro,” on the argument that the word was a common and not a proper noun. In announcing their new policy in 1930, however, the paper’s editors wrote that “every use of the capital ‘N’ becomes a tribute to millions who have risen from a low estate into the ‘brotherhood of the races.’” Many black luminaries embraced the term, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Why, then, was “Negro” largely replaced by “Black” (with the same quandary over capitalization) among 1960s civil rights activists? Kennedy marvels at the Black Power movement’s ability to invert the negative “meaning of ‘black’ (just as some African Americans have recently sought to invert the meaning of ‘nigger’).” Among the dissenters was scholar Rayford Logan, who “rejected the term ‘black’ because he saw it as the term of ‘racial chauvinists who denied that the American Negro also had European roots,’” Kennedy writes. But Logan and his allies did not get far.

Jesse Jackson’s 1988 run for the presidency occasioned a brief renaissance for  “African American.” Jackson argued that the term “has cultural integrity. It puts us in our proper historical context,” according to Kennedy. That term has become, among all races, “a conventional designation for American-born descendants of African slaves.”

Today, says Kennedy, nothing seems so perplexing as the popularization—mainly by blacks—of the term “nigger.” It has been used to shocking effect by comedian Richard Pryor (who won a Grammy Award for his album That Nigger’s Crazy), the gangsta rap group NWA (Niggaz Wit Attitude), and rapper Ice-T, who declared, “I’m a nigger not a colored man or black or a Negro or an Afro-American.” Kennedy believes that advocates of the term use it to create “boundaries between insiders and outsiders, authentic members of the club and inauthentic wannabes.” Indeed, “some signal their distinction by calling themselves ‘real niggas.’” A second factor may be the desire to corral usage of the most negative term applied to blacks, making it “off limits to whites.”

Where does Kennedy come out in the name game? “If the labels ‘Negro’ and ‘colored’ and ‘black’ and ‘African American’ were good enough for [history’s black] heroes and heroines, they are certainly good enough for me.”