If The Term Negro Feels Dirty to You…
Tell me, what do your parents’ birth certificates and congressional debates of the post-civil war constitutional amendments say?
I’ve had many people reach out about my ongoing use of the term “Negro.” Some realize the political weight “Negro” has in the legacy of multigenerational Black Americans and even their own birth certificates. And they are unbothered by reality.
Others have emotional reactions to the history of how the term was used by bigots. And, I can’t help y’all with that.
The term “Negro” has historical significance in the rich history of multigenerational Black Americans, or “Black Americans” for short. Black Americans are those people whose families were U.S. chattel slaves and emancipated from being property, and, whose ancestors were U.S. “free Negroes/Blacks” at the time of emancipation…but were still under threat of being captured and sold into chattel slavery to U.S. slaveholders and/or sold into bondage in Native American tribes.
Black Americans have been called many things in our very long history as a founding population of America.
Negro means black in Spanish and in some Portuguese dialects, as I understand it.
