I may have to pay off after all

There were a few instances where I'm pretty sure that putting on an Eric B. and Rakim record in the store ran off some tubby white dudes who were already uneasy about leaving their whitebread suburban compounds of whiteness.

The more I read about AGF, the more I think it must have been the totally awesomest place on Earth!

Gary Sax wrote:

Negro? Really Clearclaw?

Actually, he doesn't say "negro," he says "blacks/negros," which is about ten times more awkward.

Juniper wrote:

Gary Sax wrote:

Negro? Really Clearclaw?

Actually, he doesn't say "negro," he says "blacks/negros," which is about ten times more awkward.

Jun, it's almost as if he couldn't decide which moniker to use, so he decided to fire off a shotgun blast o' awkward.

Being a journalist the AP stylebook says "black" so that's what I always call them.

I mean it doesn't really make sense to call people of Jamaican, Haitian, Brazilians or other Latin American descent (and are black) "African Americans," as I'm pretty sure they associate more with those places than Africa.

Remarkably, in a thread just begging for a breakout, no one has called him on it. It appears that my hard-earned non-currency is safe for another day.

Sag.

I think you're more likely to donate the 40gg to the JC Lawrence Hospital Fund Raffle than you are to get him to admit that "negro" could even possibly be insulting to anyone under any circumstances.

False hope from the beginning.

Reminds me, I need to check in on that train wreck. Five hundred white guys playing "Racist Werewolf", and it should be almost time to vote for the hanging.

(the other thing that hadn't been called out when I read it this morning was the "liberal-leaning" guy. TOS is pretty conservative by my reckoning.)

I live in Richmond, Virginia, and the one game store here has a racist owner. His attitude has been passed on to the other fat white slobs who game there. I've seen black kids come in and watch all game playing stop as the self-righteous smelly shits who hang out there stare them down until they feel uncomfortable and leave. Like those kids wanted to shoplift your OOP Ogrethulu you asshole!

Yes, I'd say that's a racist fuckwit alright.

Elsewhere:
Licked the spew off your keyboard yet Barnesy?

Michael Barnes wrote:

The thought of hearing nerdy suburban white guys discussing anything to do about ethnicity makes me sick...
- SNIP! -

Oh the perils of cheap rhetoric!

Well, I just blew my cool and called Clearclaw a bad name.

Maybe it's because I'm not american but I got to admit I don't get it.
Since when was Negro deemed offensive? I always thought it was regarded as a more polite term than "Black".

Mr Skeletor wrote:

Maybe it's because I'm not american but I got to admit I don't get it.
Since when was Negro deemed offensive? I always thought it was regarded as a more polite term than "Black".

There was a time when it was polite. The name of the United Negro College Fund is a vestige of that time. Starting in the late 1960s, its current connotation as a milder form of "nigger" emerged when the preferred term became "black."

Yep. The term negro lost its acceptability during the Civil Rights movement. It's not necessarily that the word was bad, but more who was using it, and the disdain that was placed behind it.

Mr. Bistro wrote:

Yep. The term negro lost its acceptability during the Civil Rights movement. It's not necessarily that the word was bad, but more who was using it, and the disdain that was placed behind it.

Yes. The term 'negro' carries with it echoes of the days when the so-called 'negro race' of 19th century psuedoscience were slaves valuable enough to war over.

Mr. Bistro wrote:

Yep. The term negro lost its acceptability during the Civil Rights movement. It's not necessarily that the word was bad, but more who was using it, and the disdain that was placed behind it.

There was also a line drawn *within* the Movement about use of the term. To be "Black" was very much associated with the Black Power movement--organizations like the Black Panthers, SNCC, and the Nation of Islam; "negro" was a term that less radical organizations, such as Martin Luther King's SCLC, tended to use to denote skin color but not necessarily race/identity. You can see it in a quick comparison of 2 sections of King's 1963 March on Washington speech:

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

vs. the most famous last paragraph:

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

There were some pretty strong feelings within the Movement at the time over terminology as "Black Power" groups were considered domestic terrorist organizations by the Feds at the time [though the FBI wasn't exactly nuanced in their reading of the various organizations--any leader--of *any* race--that could potentially mobilize black America was considered a threat to national security].

All that said, the bullet that killed King also pretty much killed the acceptability of the term "Negro." "African-American," on the other hand, is, as far as I've ever been able to tell, an academic conceit designed to remove elmements of physical appearance from the language of identity.

[A similar conceit is the change of the term "Indian" to "Native American." I was Managing Editor of the Journal of American Studies for ~5 years under a professor who specialized in Native American studies. Every person of native descent that I met through her--a fair number--preferred the term "Indian" or, more appropriately, the name of their Nation/tribe. "Native American" just made white academics themselves feel better about ridding the language of words they associated with 19th century racialist views.]

JMcL63 wrote:

Mr. Bistro wrote:

Yep. The term negro lost its acceptability during the Civil Rights movement. It's not necessarily that the word was bad, but more who was using it, and the disdain that was placed behind it.

Yes. The term 'negro' carries with it echoes of the days when the so-called 'negro race' of 19th century psuedoscience were slaves valuable enough to war over.

Heh, a pseudoscience that carried itself well in to the 20th century. I've seen books describing the three primary races:

caucusoid, mongloid, negroid.

And thats from a book published in 1960.

Heh.