Memo from the PC police: "African-American" now offensive

You can't make this stuff up. Not the Bee reports that super-woke Brandeis University has updated its widely mocked list of "violent" and "identity-based" terminology ahead of the start of its fall semester.

Added to the compendium of politically incorrect words and phrases that must not be uttered on the Brandeis campus is the term "African-American".

What's wrong with that? Here's what the Brandeis PC police say: "For Black folks born in the United States, hyphenating their identity can be interpreted as othering. Some folks do prefer to use African-American, particularly in connection to their ancestral roots, while others may identify with other ethnicities. We recommend using Black as a default, but being open to adjusting if asked to."

Walt would like to know: What's "othering"? Does it mean identifying someone as different, when they (more or less) obviously are different? Is it a form of bullying? "Hey, you! You're not 'same'! You must be 'other'!" I guess that can cut in any direction. I would expect to be "othered" if I strolled through the South Side of Lori Lightfoot's Chicago. I don't know if it would happen at Brandeis. Maybe I just won't go there!

"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.

Kamala Harris: about as Black as Barack Obama

Much is being made by the Dumbocrats and the running dogs of the liberal media about the supposed "Blackness" of Kamala Harris, the one hoping Joe Biden gets elected and then dies. But, as Walt has pointed out in "Parsing the blackness of Kamala Harris" (WWW 28/8/20), Ms Harris ain't all dat Black!

She is not the first "African-American" politician to be painted as more black than is the case. [I notice you restrained yourself from saying "touched with the tar brush". Ed.] Here's a short excerpt from Obama's America, by Dinesh D'Souza (Regnery 2012).

From the liberal side: he is the first African-American president. This is probably the most common way that Obama is understood. It is certainly the way that Obama biographer David Remnick understood him in his admiring book, The Bridge. Yet there are others who insist that Obama is not really black. That's because he never sat at a segregated lunch counter, nor are any of his ancestors descended from slaves.

This is in sharp contrast with Michelle Obama, who traces her roots back to a Carolina slave plantation. Her husband, however, grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia with multiple visits to Kenya, Indonesia and Pakistan. By his own achowledgment, he didn't live the typical Black American experience.

Interestingly, as president, Obama has shown virtually no interest in black issues, from affirmative action to hate crimes to inner-city poverty. He ignores those issues, raising the hackles of black activists like Tavis Smiley, Ishmael Reed, Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West.

Reed charges, "It's obvious by now that Barack Obama is treating black Americans like one treats a demented uncle, brought out from his room to be ridiculed and scolded before company from time to time." West contends that Obama "doesn't care about the black poor.... His policies are generating misery amongst poor people, disproportionately black and brown." West terms Obama's policies "the new Jim Crow."

Let's see. "Ancestors descended from slaves": not in Ms Harris' family tree. "Never sat at a segregated lunch counter": nope, nor any other lunch counter, probably. And as a state prosecutor in California, she usually sat on the other side of the courtroom from the black folks. Walt, along with all those black activists, can hardly wait for Kamala Harris to expound at length on how she has "lived the typical black American experience."