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[SJC <indexer AT localnet.com>]

Clansgian AT wmconnect.com wrote:
> > > but I noticed that when she herself 
> > >       
> > spoke she was talking about "the negro people". 
> >
> >     
>
> A good number of people on this list are old enough to remember when the 
> common term was "colored" people.  From this era we have the National Association 
> for Advancement of Colored People.  When it was time to make an issue of that 
> word in order to demonstrate our underlying racism, the accepted term became 
> "negro" and hence we have the United Negro College Fund.  Then for a time the 
> correct term was Afro-American.  Jesse Jackson in a fit of utter ignorance 
> protested that we call people Italian Americans and and German Americans and so he 
> made a non-existent racist connection with Afro-Americans and insisted that 
> it be African-Americans.  Ignorant, I say, because it has long been 
> Franco-American, Sino-American, Russo-American, etc.  
>   
In the north it was negro until colored until Afro-American.  The switch 
from negro to colored was while I was in school (and what had prompted 
me to ask my roommate about her preference of term, she simply preferred 
the older term) in the early 60s, but by the time I went back in the 
early nineties it had switched to Afro-American.
> A business associate from England was telling me once how he hardly 
> recognized his native hamlet.  After being un the US for a few years, he returned there 
> and went ot a local restaurant and ordered black coffee.  There was silence 
> and stares.  He learned that (and I am not making this up) the proper term was 
> non-white coffee.
>
>   
Not the same thing, but reminds me of when we moved to Guinea, in VA, I 
think in about 1980 or so.  I was to go to a meeting at a particular 
house, when I asked directions, part of the direction was to "go on 
Route 626 a half mile past the black church, turn right on Achilles 
Road, and....".  Stupid me.  I went up and down Route 626 a half dozen 
times, saw a white church, and a brick church, could not see a black 
church for the life of me.  Finally stopped at a little country store, 
asked the (black) fellow at the counter about where there might be a 
black church on Route 626.  Boy, did they get a good laugh out of 
that.....turned out, of course, that the white clapboarded church was 
the black church.
> I'm only willing to take this silliness so far.  I've got a big chip on my 
> own shoulder when it comes to Southern and Mountain culture, so I try to take a 
> deep breath and listen.  Real offense I'm willing to be corrected over.  But I 
> draw the line at silliness.
>   
Much of it IS silliness and when it comes to that sort of thing, I pass, 
but that's easy up here, since it's little engaged in here.  Old is as 
likely to be "old" as "elderly", badly-behaved is apt to be "jerk" 
rather than "socially inept", and so on.

SusanJane, in Maine