Woker Than Thou
Strike a blow against police brutality. Capitalize black!
I deplore xenophobia in all forms, and try to err, on those rare occasions when I err, on the side of kindness and tolerance. If anyone wants me to refer to him or her (or, this being 2024, they) as this, rather than that, or the other, I will do so without hesitation.
That said, when I heard Lou Reed’s Transformer in 1972, I winced reflexively at “…and the colored girls sing…”, and I wish I had not. I find it ludicrous that to speak of someone of color is just fine, but to speak — without malice, of course — of someone as colored is pretty nearly a hangin’ offense, especially since before W.E.B. Du Bois pushed in the 1920 for a switch to negro in the 1920s, colored was what the descendants of kidnapped Africans in America preferred to be called. Later in the decade, Du Bois decreed that the new favored word had be capitalized. To leave it in lowercase was to show one’s self to be a bigot.
Until Stokely Carmichael introduced the phrase black power in the mid-1960s, Negro was how most black Americans described themselves. Dr. King, that rare leader who didn’t feel he needed to get people to use a word of his choosing to affirm his pre-eminence as a civil rights leader, used the term. It was what non-racists called black people. But then black activists decided that Negro connoted someone content to let their oppressors stop being monstrous only when said oppressors got around to it. Ebony magazine jettisoned Negro in favor of black at the end of the decade, even though, according to a Newsweek poll, more than two-thirds of black Americans still preferred Negro. Ebony and Stokely Carmichael knew better what was better for folks.
A decade and a half later, Jesse Jackson decreed that black people should think of themselves as African-American. As black had been to Stokeley Carmichael 20 years before — a way to assert his pre-eminence — African-American was to Jesse Jackson. Black people could now stand toe-to-toe with those whose great grandparents had immigrated from Munich, and who thought of themselves as German Americans, and with the grandchildren of immigrants from Skelleftea, Gavle, or Norrtalje, who thought of themselves as Swedish Americans.
Not that people thought very often of themselves as [Whatever] Americans.
I wonder if Jesse Jackson had any idea of the extent to which he’d succeeded. In 2004, I interviewed a number of young black Americans who were playing in the British Basketball League, asked what had surprised them about London. One of them said, “That there are so many fine African American women here.” He was speaking of the local black women.
When my friend Arouna arrived in Los Angeles in 2014, he found it hilarious that black neighbors who’d never set foot in Africa described themselves as African Americans. What did that make Arouna, freshly arrived from Burkina Faso?
Since George Floyd, there’s been the first major move to capitalization since W.E.B. Du Bois ordained that Negro deserved an uppercase N. As one no longer writes about slaves, but of enslaved people, and of the unhoused rather than of the homeless, he or she takes care to capitalize Black. Doing so presumably reduces the incidence of police brutality and systemic racism.
I am a (ultra-secular) Jew, but I’m not supposed to say so. Ideally, I should say Jewish person, or, even better, a person of the Jewish faith. The more syllables, apparently, the greater the deference. When I confessed a few years ago on the social media that I found this preposterous, someone explained to me that you mustn’t say Jews because that’s what Nazis called us.
‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky.
But enough prelude. The British grocery giant Sainsbury’s TU clothing brand outraged many outrage junkies this past week when it advertised some ugly new kiddies’ trousers as having a 'knee grow hem’.
"Are you aware,” demanded a professional offensiveness-spotter who posts on X, “that [Negro] is freely used by racists to bypass n-word filters?” His tweet was viewed 230,000 times. Another X user who apparently enjoys being offended wrote, "I had to read this 3-4 times, and thought. ‘What you on about? What's the problem?’ Then I see it and now can't unsee it.” Shrieked another, ”Had to re-read this to see the offensive words. But bloody hell. That's bad!!!!”
Well, it is indeed an inane pun, and since when do trouser retailers brag about hems, of all things? But deserving of elevated blood pressure and four exclamation marks?
Sainsbury’s dutifully put on the hair shirt and whimpered its contrition. And I winced, no less wincily than “Walk on the Wild Side” had made me do 53 years ago. Are we to go through Dr. King’s speeches now, and beep out every instance of the vile, accursed word Negro? Are we relieved to see that noble institution the United Negro College Fund going the way of KFC, which fretted that the health-conscious had come to recoil from Kentucky Fried Chicken’s middle name? UNCF now, if you please.
All this name-changing and capitalizing, all this woker-than-thou-ing each other? It’s stupid and contagious.
I have a dream, of a day when one who doesn’t capitalize black won’t be presumed to believe that colored people, negroes, Negroes, black people, African Americans, and Blacks don’t deserve equal opportunity and equal protection under the law.