Re: Whiteness?

The Gray Wizard wrote:

> The term "negro" has no validity as a "proper and original name"  for
> African-Americans.  It was a term imposed on a people whose cultural
> and historical identity was deliberately destroyed by the institution
> of slavery.  Its historical referents were slaves.  The shift from
> "negro" to "black" and "African-American" was a deliberate dissociation
> from that reference.
With my totally non-American background I understand "negro" to be
exactly as emotive as "caucasian" - that is, not emotive at all, a word
suitable for an academic textbook. I understand it to be the original
English word for the African race. In stark contrast to "nigger", of
course, which is a corruption of it.

Not in America?

Ah, but I have no plans to visit America in the foreseeable future and if
I did it would be to visit friends and not to engage in politics :-) I
have enough politics to contend with in my own country :-)

> > Speaking of race and language, how about the way in which 'racist' is
> > adopted to different cultural situations? I understand that in
> > America the term is meant in the literal sense of someone who
> > considers one race superior to another. In Australia it's not as
> > useful to have a word for that attitude, so we usually adopt the term
> > 'racism' to mean what you might call 'culturalism' or something --
> > the belief that it is harmful to compromise (ahem) the established
> > (ahem) white community with too many people of other cultures.
>
> Isn't the latter a manifestation of the former?
No, a lot of racists don't believe in absolute supremacy (that is,
supremacy regardless of context) of one race over another.

> In what sense is someone who pretends "to speak on behalf of black
> Americans" a black American, actual, virtual or otherwise. I agree that
> this is language related, but I suspect that it is a misuse of the
> adjective.
It's purely an emphasis thing, nothing more. A way of marking a statement
as something remembered from a quote rather than an academic assertion
or somesuch. The word "actual" also emphasises individuality,
highlighting that black Americans have as diverse a range of views as any
other group of human beings, and are not part of some compound entity
called "Black Americans". Is that enough or would you like me to
psychoanalyse my usage some more? :-)

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