Seven Excerpts About The History And Current (2020) Use Of The Referent "Negro" in The United States

 Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post presents several online excerpts about the history and the current (2020) use of the referent "Negro". These excerpts documents that history and considers the suitability of the formal and informal use of the referent "Negro" in 21st century United States. 

The content of this post is presented for historical, linguistic, and socio-cultural purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.

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ARTICLE EXCERPTS
These excerpts are presented in chronological order and are numbered for referencing purposes only.

Excerpt #1
From http://www.aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/negro-word-history [page no longer found]  
Date: 4-01-2001

The word Negro is discussed on this dates Registry. This brief article and its references is written to add to the history of this word.

"Negro means "black" in both Spanish and Portuguese languages, being derived from the Latin word niger of the same meaning. The term "negro", literally the Spanish and Portuguese to refer to Black Africans and people with that heritage used “black.” From the 18th century to the mid-20th century, "negro" (later capitalized) was considered the correct and proper term for African Americans. It fell out of favor by the 1970s in the United States.

In current English language usage, "Negro" generally is considered acceptable in a historical context or in the name of older organizations, as in the United Negro College Fund, and is used more commonly by those born before the post World War II baby boom. Lyndon B. Johnson was the last American president to publicly refer to the African American population as Negroes (to which, for much of his life, he gave the Texas pronunciation nigras, widely considered an insult by African Americans). Before he left office, he had begun to employ the word blacks, too. 19th and 20th century anthropologists used the related word (Negroid) to refer to a race of people from Africa. This ended in the mid-to-late 20th century.

[continues with information about the use of Negro in South American nations and elsewhere.]

….As with other racial, ethnic, and sexual words that are seen as pejoratives, some individuals have tried "reclaiming" the word. An example of this is artist Kara Walker. In the US, some African Americans may use the term playfully among themselves (as in "You can't please Negroes"), especially throughout the American South and other areas with a higher percentage of African Americans. Such usage is similar to that of the word nigga, although it is generally not considered profanity, and is less offensive."

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Excerpt #2
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122446754
January 11, 201012:00 PM ET
Heard on "Tell Me More"
"This year census workers and forms will make their way around the country taking stock of the population growths and shifts. When choosing ancestry, some will be asked to choose between African American, Black or, Negro and are surprised to see the word Negro showing up on census forms. To get a sense of why it's there, host Michel Martin speaks with Stanford University sociology professor Matthew Snipp, who works for the Census Bureau and is Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University.

MICHEL MARTIN, host:

As we said, the controversy over Senator Reid's comments comes as another branch of the government is taking heat for using the term Negro.

The 2010 census will continue to offer Negro as an option in designating race along with black and African-American. But some people are not feeling that word. They think Negro is outdated, tired and even offensive. We recently discussed this issue with Matthew Snipp. He's a professor of sociology and the director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. He's consulting with the Census Bureau about ways to elicit more accurate information about race and identity.

Professor Snipp said he understood why some people reacted so strongly to the word Negro being offered on the 2010 census.

Professor MATTHEW SNIPP (Sociology, Stanford University): I'm not surprised at all because these kinds of issues do mean a lot to people in terms of how they identify themselves. And, in fact, as I recall, this concern was raised I think in 1990 and again in 2000. So, it's not really a new concern, but it's probably gaining more salience as time passes.

MARTIN: We invited Census to participate in our conversation, by the way. They declined to join us but the Census Bureau did speak to another media outlet. Spokesman Jack Martin said that the use of the term was intended as a term of inclusion because many older Americans still identify themselves that way.

Prof. SNIPP: I think that's right. The census is this amazing event, which is intended to include every person residing within our nation within the time that the census is taken, and they periodically go back and they try to identify terms and language that resonate with different segments of the American population.

And what they've found over the years and continue to find is there's a segment of the population for whom Negro is a resonant, acceptable term. I think they tend to be mostly older Americans, you know, more often in the south than in other parts of the country. But because it is an older generation of persons who identify as Negro, I could see this term disappearing in 2020 or 2030.

MARTIN: Have other terms disappeared? Did "colored" ever make an appearance?

Prof. SNIPP: Yes, as I recall it did. In 1890s they talked about Mulattoes, octoroons and quadroons. Asian Indians used to be referred to as Hindus.

[...]

MARTIN: It is an interesting question because on the one hand, you do want people to see themselves in the form and thus respond to it, but I can't think of anybody who uses the term Negro anymore. I mean, it's - the only reference I can think of is: Are you familiar with the expression "Negro, please"?

Prof. SNIPP: No, I'm not.

MARTIN: No, it's meant to call somebody out and to say you're just - you're making no sense.

Prof. SNIPP: Yeah.

MARTIN: Yeah, by definition, "African-American, please" just doesn't work. I don't know why.”…
-snip-
Pancocojams Editor's note:
I believe that “Negro please” is a polite, but still disdainful way of saying “nigga please" When an African American says "Negro please" to another African American, it means that the person who is referred to has said or done something stupid or foolish. In that sentence, the word "Negro"* carries insulting connotations and the word "please" is elongated to show that the person who is speaking is being anything but polite.

Furthermore, after the 1960s and 1970s, when "Negro" is used as a referent for an African American by another African Americans, it is usually considered to be a put down (insult). This is particular true if the word is spelled with a lower case "n". 

Click https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQFScZ9OvLY&ab_channel=SERGIOVASQUEZ 
for a brief clip from the 2004 comedy White Chicks. In that movie, the African American lead character Latrell Spenser says "Negro please" in response to the Black undercover agent's reveal that he's a Black man and not a White chick (woman). That clip ends with Latrell Spencer saying "Get that jigaboo out of here". "Jigaboo" is a highly offensive referent for a Black person. 

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Excerpt #3
From https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2010/october.htm

When Did the Word Negro Become Socially Unacceptable? - October 2010

Question: Senator Harry Reid got in trouble for referring to President Obama as a "light skinned" African American with "no Negro dialect." What's the big dea with using the work Negro? Last time I checked there was a United Negro College Fund run by blacks.
--John Babcock - Williams, Arizona

Answer

Obama and Reid

Senator Harry Reid apologized for his comment, made before the 2008 election, that Barack Obama could win in part because he was a "light skinned" African-American with "no Negro dialect." Reid, who is resisting calls for his resignation, described the gaffe as a "poor choice of words." When did the word Negro become socially unacceptable?

It started its decline in 1966 and was totally uncouth by the mid-1980s. The turning point came when Stokely Carmichael coined the phrase black power at a 1966 rally in Mississippi. Until then, Negro was how most black Americans described themselves. But in Carmichael's speeches and in his landmark 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, he persuasively argued that the term implied black inferiority. Among black activists, Negro soon became shorthand for a member of the establishment. Prominent black publications like Ebony switched from Negro to black at the end of the decade, and the masses soon followed. According to a 1968 Newsweek poll, more than two-thirds of black Americans still preferred Negro, but black had become the majority preference by 1974. Both the Associated Press and the New York Times abandoned Negro in the 1970s, and by the mid-1980s, even the most hidebound institutions, like the U.S. Supreme Court, had largely stopped using Negro.

Had Sen. Reid chosen to defend his word choice, he could have cited some formidable authorities. Colored was the preferred term for black Americans until W.E.B. Du Bois, following the lead of Booker T. Washington, advocated for a switch to Negro in the 1920s. (Du Bois also used black in his writings, but it wasn't his term of choice.) Despite claims that Negro was a white-coined word intended to marginalize black people, Du Bois argued that the term was "etymologically and phonetically" preferable to colored or "various hyphenated circumlocutions." Most importantly, the new terminology -- chosen by black leaders themselves-symbolized a rising tide of black intellectual, artistic, and political assertiveness. (After achieving the shift in vocabulary, Du Bois spearheaded a letter-writing campaign to capitalize his preferred term. In 1930 -- nine years before Harry Reid was born -- the New York Times Style Book made the change.) Black supplanted Negro when the energy of this movement waned.

In 1988, after the black power movement had itself faded, many leaders decided another semantic change was required. Jesse Jackson led the push toward African-American. But, so far, the change does not seem to have the same momentum that Negro and black once did. In recent polls, most black interviewees express no preference between black and African-American, and most publications don't recommend the use of one over the other.

It can be challenging for institutions and older people, who have seen racial terms come and go during their lifetimes, to adapt. The NAACP, founded in 1909, declined to change its name during the DuBois revolution but did stop using colored in all other contexts. Negro History Week, begun in 1926, changed to Black History Month in 1976. The United Negro College Fund is now trying to emphasize its initials rather than its full name. The last time the Supreme Court used the word Negro outside quotation marks or citations to other scholarship was in 1985. The writer was Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice, who came of age during the time of DuBois. Despite public outcry, the U.S. Census still includes the word Negro, because many older people still use it.

October 2010 response courtesy of Slate http://www.slate.com/id/2241120/ "

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Excerpt #4
From http://www.wnd.com/2016/05/obama-bans-federal-use-of-words-negro-oriental/#! OBAMA BANS FEDERAL USE OF WORDS 'NEGRO,' 'ORIENTAL'
'At long last this insulting and outdated term will be gone'

Published: 05/23/2016; CHERYL CHUMLEY
"President Obama signed a legislatively passed amendment to the Local Public Works and Capital Development and Investment Act of 1976 that bans the federal government from using the words “Negro” and “Oriental” to describe blacks and Asians.

 The measure also updates how the federal government describes minorities, and replaces ‘Negro” with African-American and American Indians as Native Americans. The acceptable reference for Oriental is now Asian-American,.

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Excerpt #5
From http://observer.com/2016/06/negroes-you-aint-never-seen-before-al-sharpton-tears-into-race-for-rangel-seat/  ‘Negroes You Ain’t Never Seen Before’: Al Sharpton Tears into Race for Rangel Seat

By Will Bredderman • 06/25/16
"The Rev. Al Sharpton breathed fire into the red-hot race for retiring Congressman Charles Rangel‘s seat—using a weekly live address to endorse Rangel’s favored successor and to blast “political gentrification,” “new leadership” and “negroes you ain’t never seen before.”

 The controversial black leader launched the fusillade of apparent attacks on candidates Clyde Williams and State Senator Adriano Espaillat during a gathering with supporters broadcast from the Harlem headquarters of his National Action Network. Joining him at the event were Rangel himself and former New York City Mayor David Dinkins, both backers of Harlem Assemblyman Keith Wright‘s candidacy for the soon-to-be-vacant House seat.

You’re supposed to be attracted to Negroes you ain’t never seen before. I mean, they must have a laboratory to just create these Negroes,” Sharpton declared. “Just because you joined the church this Sunday doesn’t mean you get to preach next Sunday. You gotta pay some dues.”
-snip-
In that article, "Negroes"  is used as an insulting referent that evokes "Uncle Tom" Black folks who are subservient to and used by White folks.

As a point of information, Adriano Espaillat won that congressional campaign and represents New York’s Thirteenth Congressional District since January 3, 2017 https://espaillat.house.gov/about

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Excerpt #6
From https://www.npr.org/2017/12/13/568317026/negro-not-allowed-on-federal-forms-white-house-to-decide 'Negro' Not Allowed On Federal Forms? White House To Decide
by Hansi Lo Wang, December 13, 2017

"It has been called antiquated and even insulting.

 But back in 1900, "Negro" was considered modern — a term that could replace a flawed set of categories used to classify people of African descent for the U.S. census.

 This was a period when a person's race was determined by a census taker, who reported the information back to the federal government based on observations. "Be particularly careful to distinguish between blacks, mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons," census takers were instructed for the 1890 census.

 "The word 'black' should be used to describe those persons who have three-fourths or more black blood; 'mulatto,' those persons who have from three-eighths to five-eighths black blood; 'quadroon,' those persons who have one-fourth black blood; and 'octoroon,' those persons who have one-eighth or any trace of black blood."

 But later in a report on the 1890 census results, the government concluded: "These figures are of little value." "Quadroon" and "octoroon" have never been used again for the census. ("Mulatto," first used in 1850, made return appearances in 1910 and 1920.)

The 1900 census took a different approach to counting people of African descent. For the first time, "Negro" was added to the instructions, and census takers were trained to write "B" on their worksheets to report a person as "black (Negro or of Negro descent)." Who fit that definition was up for the census taker's interpretation.

 The Census Bureau said using "Negro" for the 1900 census was "justified" by what it saw as growing acceptance for the term, as it explained in a 1904 report called "Negroes in the United States":

 "That the dislike and avoidance of the word negro among members of the African race is disappearing seems to be implied by current usage as indicated in the title of such books as Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois's 'The Philadelphia Negro,' and Mr. Booker T. Washington's 'The Future of the American Negro' [sic]."

More than a century later, though, the Census Bureau made an about-face. It announced in 2013 that it would drop the word from the census and other surveys. The U.S. Army made a similar decision in 2014 for an official document detailing its equal opportunity policy. In 2016, President Barack Obama signed a law to "modernize" a couple of 1970s-era laws by replacing "Negro" with "African American." (It also switched out "Oriental" for "Asian American.")

These moves allowed the government and its institutions to catch up with generational shifts within the black community. After decades of an ongoing debate about labels, the term "Negro" — once commonly used by Martin Luther King Jr. and other early civil rights era leaders — gave way to the rise of "black" beginning in the mid-1960s and later "African-American" in the late 1980s.

"Negro," however, is not forbidden on federal forms today. In fact, the term is an option that "can be used if desired" to describe the "black" category when collecting information about race, according to a policy directive from the White House Office of Management and Budget. This agency sets the standards for race and ethnicity data for the federal government — data that is used to draw legislative districts, enforce civil rights laws and measure health effects.

Decision pending

Right now, the Trump administration is considering an Obama-era proposal to remove "Negro" from those standards. Another proposed change is to remove the term "Far East," which currently describes a geographic region of origin for people of Asian descent. Other possible policy revisions could radically change the way the government counts the Latino population and people with roots in the Middle East or North Africa.

When OMB will announce its decision on all of these proposed changes, however, is an open question. The agency had previously said Dec. 1 was its self-imposed deadline, and it has not responded to NPR's inquiries about the delay

The term "Negro" was only added to the federal standards in 1997. That was the last time the policy, first released in 1977, underwent major revisions.

The Clinton administration approved a recommendation to add "Negro" to the standards as an optional term, as proposed by an advisory committee of experts from federal agencies.

"Using more than one term [for the 'Black' category on federal surveys and other forms] is more inclusive and could achieve more complete coverage of the Black population," the committee members wrote in a 1997 report, citing research from the mid-1990s that suggested that "older Blacks" favored "Negro." (Their report also notes " 'Colored' was favored by some Blacks in the South.")

The current proposal to remove "Negro" has been endorsed by a recently-formed advisory group of federal experts who cited concerns that survey participants today may find the term "outdated" or "offensive." The NAACP and other civil rights groups have also called for the word to go.

"There is a very clear consensus that the obsolete term 'Negro' should be eliminated," said Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, in a written statement about the White House's delayed announcement. "We urge the administration to proceed immediately, keeping the fairness and accuracy of the census at the forefront of concern." ”…
-snip-
Here's a quote from the Feb. 25, 2020 article entitled "The changing categories the U.S. census has used to measure race"  https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/25/the-changing-categories-the-u-s-has-used-to-measure-race/

"For the 2020 census, the bureau did decide to drop the word "Negro" from what had been the “Black, African American, or Negro” response option."...

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Excerpt #7
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negro
..."United States

Prevalence of "negro" as a demonym has varied in American English. All-Negro Comics was a 1947 comic anthology written by African-American writers and featuring black characters.

Negro superseded colored as the most polite word for African Americans at a time when black was considered more offensive.[7] In 17th-century Colonial America, the term "Negro" had been also, according to one historian, used to describe Native Americans.[8] John Belton O'Neall's The Negro Law of South Carolina (1848) stipulated that "the term negro is confined to slave Africans, (the ancient Berbers) and their descendants. It does not embrace the free inhabitants of Africa, such as the Egyptians, Moors, or the negro Asiatics, such as the Lascars."[9] The American Negro Academy was founded in 1897, to support liberal arts education. Marcus Garvey used the word in the names of black nationalist and pan-Africanist organizations such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association (founded 1914), the Negro World (1918), the Negro Factories Corporation (1919), and the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World (1920). W. E. B. Du Bois and Dr. Carter G. Woodson used it in the titles of their non-fiction books, The Negro (1915) and The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933) respectively. "Negro" was accepted as normal, both as exonym and endonym, until the late 1960s, after the later Civil Rights Movement. One well-known example is the identification by Martin Luther King, Jr. of his own race as "Negro" in his famous "I Have a Dream" speech of 1963.

However, during the 1950s and 1960s, some black American leaders, notably Malcolm X, objected to the word Negro because they associated it with the long history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination that treated African Americans as second class citizens, or worse.[10] Malcolm X preferred Black to Negro, but also started using the term Afro-American after leaving the Nation of Islam.[11]

Since the late 1960s, various other terms have been more widespread in popular usage. These include black, Black African, Afro-American (in use from the late 1960s to 1990) and African American.[12] Like many other similar words, the word "black", of Anglo-Saxon/Germanic origin, has a greater impact than "Negro", of French/Latinate origin (see Linguistic purism in English). The word Negro fell out of favor by the early 1970s. However, many older African Americans initially found the term black more offensive than Negro.

The term Negro is still used in some historical contexts, such as the songs known as Negro spirituals, the Negro Leagues of sports in the early and mid-20th century, and organizations such as the United Negro College Fund.[13][14] The academic journal published by Howard University since 1932 still bears the title Journal of Negro Education, but others have changed: e.g. the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (founded 1915) became the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History in 1973, and is now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History; its publication The Journal of Negro History became The Journal of African American History in 2001. Margo Jefferson titled her 2015 book Negroland: A Memoir to evoke growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in the African-American upper class.

 The United States Census Bureau included Negro on the 2010 Census, alongside Black and African-American, because some older black Americans still self-identify with the term.[15][16][17] The U.S. Census now uses the grouping "Black, African-American, or Negro". Negro is used in efforts to include older African Americans who more closely associate with the term.[18] On the other hand, the term has been censored by some newspaper archives.[19]"...

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