Edited by Azizi Powell
This pancocojams post presents excerpts from a January 31, 1989 New York Times article by Isabel Wilkerson entitled "African-American" Favored By Many Of America's Blacks" .
This pancocojams post also presents excerpts from a June 26,2020 New York Times article by John Eligon entitled "A Debate Over Identity and Race Asks, Are African-Americans ‘Black’ or ‘black’?"
The content of this post is presented for historical and socio-cultural purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.
-snip-
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2020/09/how-african-american-won-what-should-we.html for the closely related pancocojams post entitled "How "African American" Won The "What Should We Be Called" Contest" (and other comments about the "African American" referent)
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ARTICLE EXCERPT #1 .
From https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/31/us/african-american-favored-by-many-of-america-s-blacks.html "African-American" Favored By Many Of America's Blacks"
By Isabel Wilkerson, January 31, 1989
" A movement led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson to call blacks
African-Americans has met with both rousing approval and deep-seated skepticism
in a debate that is coming to symbolize the role and history of blacks in this
country.
Now a term that was once considered militant is going mainstream. '' 'African-American' reflects a post-modern black consciousness,'' said Dr. Roderick Watts, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University, who last year founded a community group with the name the Association of Agencies Serving African-Americans. ''It has a self-affirming quality that seems to fit right now.''
-snip-
Notice that the term "African American" is hyphenated ("African-American"). However, within a short amount of time, people in the United States stopped adding the hyphen, as was and is the case with other double words that are initially spelled with a hyphen (like "hip hop" instead of "hip-hop".)
****
ARTICLE EXCERPT #2
From https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/black-african-american-style-debate.html
" It’s the difference between black and Black. A longtime push
by African-American scholars and writers to capitalize the word black in the
context of race has gained widespread acceptance in recent weeks and unleashed
a deep debate over identity, race and power.
****
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Visitor comments are welcome.
This pancocojams post presents excerpts from a January 31, 1989 New York Times article by Isabel Wilkerson entitled "African-American" Favored By Many Of America's Blacks" .
This pancocojams post also presents excerpts from a June 26,2020 New York Times article by John Eligon entitled "A Debate Over Identity and Race Asks, Are African-Americans ‘Black’ or ‘black’?"
The content of this post is presented for historical and socio-cultural purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.
-snip-
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2020/09/how-african-american-won-what-should-we.html for the closely related pancocojams post entitled "How "African American" Won The "What Should We Be Called" Contest" (and other comments about the "African American" referent)
****
ARTICLE EXCERPT #1 .
From https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/31/us/african-american-favored-by-many-of-america-s-blacks.html "African-American" Favored By Many Of America's Blacks"
By Isabel Wilkerson, January 31, 1989
The term, used for years in intellectual circles, is gaining
currency among many other blacks, who say its use is a sign that they are
accepting their difficult past and resolving a long ambivalence toward Africa.
The term has already shown up in the newest grade-school
textbooks, been adopted by several black-run radio stations and newspapers
around the country and appeared in the titles of popular books and in the
conversations of many blacks as they warm to the idea and speak of visiting
Africa one day.
[...]
Few people who favor the new term expect to see it replace
''black'' entirely, although they would like it to be the principal reference
eventually. For now, there does not seem to be the distaste toward ''black''
that many felt toward ''Negro'' or ''colored'' two decades ago. Instead, there
is a feeling that ''African-American'' can sometimes convey a significance that
''black'' cannot.
[...]
The question of a name has caused pain and controversy since
the first Africans were captured and shipped to the Americas in the 17th
century. The slaves called themselves Africans at first, but slave masters gave
them English names and called them Negroes, the Portuguese word for black,
historians say. That term was resented by some blacks who said it was degrading
when whites mispronounced it, accidentally or intentionally.
The term African-American has had several incarnations in
previous years, with ''Afro-American'' having spurts of popularity since the
late 19th century and particularly in the 1960's. But supporters of the current
movement find fault with that usage. ''We came from Africa,'' said Dr. Olive
Taylor, a professor of history at Howard University. ''We didn't come from
'Afro.' ''
Arthur Ashe decided to use the term in his new book, ''A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete,'' published late last year by Amistad-Warner. ''It was given a great deal of thought; it was definitely not going to be 'black,' '' the tennis player said. '' 'African-American' is much more appropriate and correct than 'Afro-American' or 'black' or any other alternative. And I didn't want to leave the wrong impression with something so permanent as a book.''
[...]
Now a term that was once considered militant is going mainstream. '' 'African-American' reflects a post-modern black consciousness,'' said Dr. Roderick Watts, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University, who last year founded a community group with the name the Association of Agencies Serving African-Americans. ''It has a self-affirming quality that seems to fit right now.''
-snip-
Notice that the term "African American" is hyphenated ("African-American"). However, within a short amount of time, people in the United States stopped adding the hyphen, as was and is the case with other double words that are initially spelled with a hyphen (like "hip hop" instead of "hip-hop".)
****
ARTICLE EXCERPT #2
From https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/black-african-american-style-debate.html
By John Eligon, June 26, 2020
A Debate Over Identity and Race Asks, Are African-Americans
‘Black’ or ‘black’?
The push to capitalize black to refer to African-Americans
is far more than a typographical change.
Hundreds of news organizations over the past month have
changed their style to Black in reference to the race of people, including The
Associated Press, long considered an influential arbiter of journalism style.
Far more than a typographical change, the move is part of a generations-old
struggle over how best to refer to those who trace their ancestry to Africa.
The capitalization of black, which has been pushed for
years, strikes at deeper questions over the treatment of people of African
descent, who were stripped of their identities and enslaved in centuries past,
and whose struggles to become fully accepted as part of the American experience
continue to this day.
“Blackness fundamentally shapes any core part of any black
person’s life in the U.S. context, and really around the world,” said Brittney
Cooper, an associate professor at Rutgers University whose latest book,
“Eloquent Rage,” explores black feminism. “In the choice to capitalize, we are
paying homage to a history with a very particular kind of political
engagement.”
The move toward Black is not embraced by all
African-Americans, and two of the country’s major news outlets, The New York
Times and The Washington Post, are still wrestling over whether to make the
change.
“Black is a color,” said the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, the
longtime civil rights leader who popularized the term “African-American” in an
effort to highlight the cultural heritage of those with ancestral ties to
Africa. “We built the country through the African slave trade. African-American
acknowledges that. Any term that emphasizes the color and not the heritage
separates us from our heritage.”
There are also concerns that turning black into a proper
noun lumps people of the African diaspora into a monolithic group and erases
the diversity of their experiences. Some have said it bestows credibility upon
a social construct created to oppress black people. Perhaps the most notable
concern is what to do about white and brown as racial identifiers.
So far, most news organizations have declined to capitalize
white, generally arguing that it is an identifier of skin color, not shared
experience, and that white supremacist groups have adopted that convention.
But some scholars say that to write “Black” but not “White”
is to give white people a pass on seeing themselves as a race and recognizing
all the privileges they get from it.
“Whiteness is not incidental,” the sociologist Eve Ewing
wrote on Twitter in arguing to capitalize white as well. She added: “Whiteness
is a thing. Whiteness is endowed with social meaning that allows people to move
through the world in a way that people who are not white are not able to do.”
At a recent online meeting of Race/Related, a cross-desk
team devoted to race coverage at The Times, a discussion of whether to
capitalize black or not made clear that there is not universal agreement, even
among African-Americans on the staff.
“It has been the subject of a lively and surprising debate,”
said Dean Baquet, the Times’s executive editor, who has indicated that he will
announce a decision on the issue soon.
The debate over racial vocabulary is unfolding amid growing
recognition across society of the need to tackle racism after several
high-profile police killings of black people incited mass protests nationwide.
The acceptable terms in America for identifying black people
have evolved over generations, from colored to Negro to black and
African-American. Also commonly used is “people of color,” an umbrella term
used to include many ethnic minorities.
In the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, which has
unleashed a national conversation on questions of race and racism, many say the
country is long overdue to standardize the use of the uppercase B in black,
which has been commonly used at black media outlets for a long time.
[…]
The debate among black people in America over how they
should be described has often centered on identity as a political statement.
In her 1904 essay “Do We Need Another Name?” Fannie Barrier
Williams, an educator and activist, described a lively discussion unfolding at
the time among African-American scholars over whether to shed the label Negro
in favor of terms like colored or Afro-American. Colored, she wrote, was a
“name that is suggestive of progress toward respectful recognition.”
At the heart of the discussion, she wrote, was whether
African-Americans needed a new label divorced from Negro and its connections to
slavery, something of a fresh start that indicated their new place in society
as free people.
Some, like W.E.B. Du Bois, favored keeping the term Negro
and transforming it into something positive — an affirmation of their
perseverance as a people and their freedom.
“There are so many Negroes who are not Negroes, so many
colored people who are not colored, and so many Afro-Americans who are not
Africans that it is simply impossible even to coin a term that will precisely
designate and connote all the people who are now included under any one of the
terms mentioned,” Barrier Williams wrote.
Negro became the predominant identifier of people of African
descent for much of the first half of the 20th century, and even then
descendants of enslaved people from Africa waged a yearslong campaign before
getting most of society, including The Times, to capitalize it.
With the rise of the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s,
the word black, once seen as an insult for many African-Americans, started
winning embrace. In just a few years, it became the predominant descriptor of
black people as Negro became obsolete. Mr. Jackson’s campaign brought
African-American into popular use in the late 1980s, and it is now often used
interchangeably with black.
For proponents of capitalizing black, there are grammatical
reasons — it is a proper noun, referring to a specific group of people with a
shared political identity, shaped by colonialism and slavery. But some see it
as a moral issue as well.
It confers a sense of power and respect to black people, who
have often been relegated to the lowest rungs of society through racist
systems, black scholars say.
systems, black scholars say.
“Race as a concept is not real in the biological sense, but
it’s very real for our own identities,” said Whitney Pirtle, an assistant
professor of sociology specializing in critical race theory at the University
of California, Merced. “I think that capitalizing B both sort of puts respect
to those identities, but also alludes to the humanities.”….
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