Quote:
Originally Posted by Labonte18
There's a Bloom County cartoon from the late 80's.. Steve Dallas, after having his personality flipped, is calling out his mother who said "There's the cutest little colored girl outside"
The mother says "well, there's the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.. I don't think the negroes mind at all"..
Dallas - "You can't say Negro in 1988!"
Mother - "What about the United Negro College Fund?"
Dallas - "Lets just agree to use the term "People of Color"
Mother - "People of Color.. Colored People"
Lord knows how many content filters I just hit with that. Anyway. this topic just reminded me of that cartoon. and i'll bring up a few rambling points..
It's a double edged sword how we are a melting pot, but keep pride in our heritages. I've got ancestors who fought on both sides during the civil war. I can trace my family heritage back to Scotland.. Where Castle Sorbie still stands, our ancestral home.. We were tossed out of Scotland and migrated to Ireland, then England, then the US, at least on my fathers side. Clan Hannay.. Think about that. How wild do you have to be to be kicked out of Scotland?
My mothers side.. I know little about. She was adopted. I figured out her parents.. And her great great grandfather, as best I can tell.. Was ether black or some mix.. Don't know much about him.. If you want to stereotype.. He literally went to the store for a pack of smokes and still hasn't made it back.. But.. My genetic profile, thanks to him, is 1.2% Sub-Saharan Africa with Nigeria being the most prevalent.. Along with just a smidge of Asian and Native American.. Unfortunately, not enough to claim some of that sweet casino money.
What am I supposed to call myself? Well.. Like most of us.. I'm a mutt.
But.. While I do take some pride in the Scottish heritage, and have the skin and melanoma from it.. It doesn't define me. There are people, however.. We'll never truly be our own until we stop identifying ourselves by pretty ancient ancestry.
Also.. Look.. You look at me.. I'm the whitest guy in the room. Just like the Scottish ancestry (If it's not Scottish, it's CRAP!) the fact that I have a small amount of African ancestry is nothing more than a curious piece of the puzzle that makes up me.
I do take perverse joy in the people who are racist and find out that they have African ancestry, tho.. There is NOTHING that sets off the schadenfreud in me quite like that.
Just another random thought.. Someone brought this up.. Anyone black in the US is almost automatically considered "African American".. I think it was Crab Man on "My Name is Earl", when his white wife brought up they could try to get reparations he mentioned "My family immigrated from Canada". I think it'd probably be shocking how many "African Americans" have very little African heritage. Often a whole lot of South American is mixed in there.
As for people in England and elsewhere asking where someone is originally from.. Remember.. Compared to them.. We're a very young country. Even here at ~250 years. England and France have been around much, much longer than that. So, in a sense, that's a bit understandable.
FWIW.. you track any of us back far enough.. Pretty sure you hit Africa. It's not called the cradle of civilization for nothin'.
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I appreciated your post. Two things came to mind.
When I was living in Colorado, an elderly neighbor of mine (I hesitate to use the word elderly since now I am approaching her age then) would use the term "colored" when talking about Blacks. I sort of cringed when she would say it, although I suspected it was just perhaps the polite term when she was born back in the 1930s. Then one day she invited me to an event at her church. She was sort of the greeter at the event, which was designed especially for potential new comers. Twice Black couples came in and she stepped right up, greeted them warmly, shook hands with them using both her hands, and spent a few minutes talking with each of them, then introduced them to other folks, and when the event was over made a point of speaking to them again as they were leaving. She was
very welcoming to them.
I also remember one year back when I was a principal, and I was having a community meeting to discuss our state test scores (NCLB). I was routinely referring to "our Black students". Suddenly a white parent stood up and said something along the lines of, "Mr. Victor, you should be calling them African-American students". At which a Black parent stood up and said something to the effect of, "Leave Mr. Victor alone. Several of us are families who are still citizens of countries in Africa. We are not African-Americans. Mr. Victor saying Black is the best thing to say here".
Often it comes down to intent. And it has been a bit challenging for White folks as the preferred (?) label has evolved. When I was growing up, "Negro" was the polite term that my family always used. To some people at the time, "colored" was the polite term. Colored people. People of color. Then there were times that African-American came into more common usage (guess that was the 1960s, as I recall), then there was a debate about whether there should be a dash between African and American. Then Black. And, just like the labels we school people used for special ed student classification, we get lost in what's up-to-date. And that's why what I try to determine is
what is the intent.
The very first 2 events that I remember in my childhood revolved around race. We lived in an all-white town in western NYS. On a trip south when I was just 4, I saw my first "Negro" when we went into a restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia...a bus-man...and this little boy said, very loudly, "Grandma, look how black he is!" Ad my grandmother was shushing me up, the bus-man came over to our table and said, "That's alright ma'am. He seems like a nice little boy". And I thought what a nice man he was. And we all know how important first impressions are. And the very next day, at a train station bathroom stopped, I ran over and started drinking out of a water fountain labeled "Colored Only". My grandmother stopped me, saying that the sign meant it was water only for Negroes, and I had to go to the other water fountain labeled "Whites only". I remember standing there with my hands on my hips and proclaiming, "Well that's stupid!"
And again, to me it all goes back to intent.
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