"Negro" or "black" or "Afro-American"? American historian weighs in

Joseph Chamberlain Furnas (24/11/1905 – 3/6/2001) was an American freelance writer, whose works include a trilogy of social histories of the United States: The Americans (covering the period 1570-1914), Great Times (covering the period 1914-1929) and Stormy Weather: Crosslights on the 1930s (which covers the time between the stock market crash and the attack on Pearl Harbor.) 

Mr Furnas was a Quaker, and a believer in the equality and brotherhood of man. Two of his books, The Road to Harper's Ferry and Goodbye to Uncle Tom, deal with "black" issues, notably slavery, which he viewed as an evil institution which degraded (black) slaves and (white) masters alike.

The Road to Harper's Ferry is an account of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, which delves into the lives and motivations of the "Secret Six" who gave him a great deal of his support. Goodbye to Uncle Tom examines how Uncle Tom's Cabin, both as a novel and in its many stage adaptations, has shaped American attitudes towards "Afro-Americans" and slavery.

I've put quotation marks around "black" and "Afro-Americans" for a reason. Mr Furnas wrestled throughout his writing with what to call people of the coloured persuasion. In a footnote at pp 405-6 of The Americans (G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1969), he explains his preference for the word "Negro" to those terms which came before ("coloured") or later ("black"). 

Most of this book had been drafted before the recent shift frm "Negro" to "black" to designate Americans with discernibly West African genetic traits. Many Northern politicians and most of the communications industry [today we'd say "media". Walt] have adoped the term. I have...considered making the change throughout this book. Several rasons have deterred me.

For instance, there is no reliable way to learn how acceptable the term "black" may be to the many million Americans most directly affected. It has been used contemptuously for centuries, particularly by the British. 

Then the change seems pointless as a matter of logic. "Negro" is simply Spanish-Portuguese for "black". Neither term accurately describes either the skin pigmentation or (if "Negro" is used as anthropologists sometimes use it) the genetic makeup of most of the Americans to whom it is applied.

Either word could apply to the many Melanesians who are very disttantly if at all related to the West Africans from whom American Negroes descend. So "black" is no improvement if intelligibility is the test.

There is good reason to believe that the actual motivation, maybe often unconscious, of the current sponsors of "black", of the militant separatist-minded leaders a mong them, is to express alienation from all whites, even their most earnest well-wishers, instead of an effort toward higher accuracy of group-definition. 

Were I to make the shift in this book, I might well find within a year or two that a new token of alienation, maybe "Afro-American", had succeeded "black". 

And that's exactly what happened, except that "African-American" was more widely used than "Afro-American". Then, as "African-Americans" began to visit their ancestral homelands, as members of the Peace Corps or just as tourists, they discovered that they were strangers there, just as much as the evil whites. 

So we don't hear/read "African-American" any more. The current politically correct term is "Black", with a capital "B", as in "Black lives matter." I guess that's better than "black" because the capital shows that progressive people are giving "Black" folks mo' respeck... or something like that. [Should we call ourselves "White"? Ed.] Too bad Mr Furnas didn't live to comment on the current wokeness.