![]() Negro denotes "black" in Spanish and Portuguese, derived from the Latin word niger, meaning black, which itself is probably from a Proto-Indo-European root *nek w-, "to be dark", akin to *nok w-, "night". Negro was also used of the peoples of West Africa in old maps labelled Negroland, an area stretching along the Niger River.įrom the 18th century to the late 1960s, negro (later capitalized) was considered to be the proper English-language term for people of black African origin. According to Oxford Dictionaries, use of the word "now seems out of date or even offensive in both British and US English". Ī specifically female form of the word, negress (sometimes capitalized), was occasionally used. However, like Jewess, it has all but completely fallen out of use. Negroid was used within physical anthropology to denote one of the three purported races of humankind, alongside Caucasoid and Mongoloid. Negroid as a noun was used to designate a wider or more generalized category than Negro as an adjective, it qualified a noun as in, for example, "negroid features". Prevalence of "negro" as a demonym has varied in American English. All-Negro Comics was a 1947 comic anthology written by African-American writers and featuring black characters. Negro superseded colored as the most polite word for African Americans at a time when black was considered more offensive. In 17th-century colonial America, the term Negro had been also, according to one historian, used to describe Native Americans. John Belton O'Neall's The Negro Law of South Carolina (1848) stipulated that "the term negro is confined to slave Africans, (the ancient Berbers) and their descendants. It does not embrace the free inhabitants of Africa, such as the Egyptians, Moors, or the negro Asiatics, such as the Lascars." The American Negro Academy was founded in 1897, to support liberal arts education. Marcus Garvey used the word in the names of black nationalist and pan-Africanist organizations such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association (founded 1914), the Negro World (1918), the Negro Factories Corporation (1919), and the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World (1920). Woodson used it in the titles of their non-fiction books, The Negro (1915) and The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933) respectively. Negro was accepted as normal, both as exonym and endonym, until the late 1960s, after the later Civil Rights Movement. self-identification as Negro in his famous " I Have a Dream" speech of 1963. However, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the word Negro began to be criticized as having been imposed by white people, and having connotations of racial subservience and Uncle Tomism. The term Black, in contrast, denoted pride, power, and a rejection of the past. It took root first in more militant groups such as the Black Muslims and Black Panthers, and by 1967, SNCC leader Stokeley Carmichael pushed for the abandonment of Negro. After the Newark riots in the summer of 1967, one third to one half of young Black males polled in Newark self-identified as Black. The term coexisted for a while with Negro, with the newer term initially referring only to progressive or radical Blacks, while Negro was used more for the Black establishment. : 499 Malcolm X preferred Black to Negro, but also started using the term Afro-American after leaving the Nation of Islam. Since the late 1960s, various other terms have been more widespread in popular usage. These include Black, Black African, Afro-American (in use from the late 1960s to 1990) and African American. Like many other similar words, the word Black, of Anglo-Saxon/Germanic origin, has a greater impact than Negro, of French/Latinate origin (see Linguistic purism in English). The word Negro fell out of favor by the early 1970s. However, many older African Americans initially found the term black more offensive than Negro. The term Negro is still used in some historical contexts, such as the songs known as Negro spirituals, the Negro leagues of baseball in the early and mid-20th century, and organizations such as the United Negro College Fund. The academic journal published by Howard University since 1932 still bears the title Journal of Negro Education, but others have changed: e.g. The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (founded 1915) became the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History in 1973, and is now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History its publication The Journal of Negro History became The Journal of African American History in 2001.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |