Comments on: Is Negro a Derogatory Term?

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 23:06:00 +0000

Aitcharr, I suggest you just try “Negra” (Negro in a southern accent). That should work for you just fine.

Let me know how that goes.

By: Aitcharr

Aitcharr — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 22:41:34 +0000

After reading all these threads/tags/blogs/comments I still don’t know how to “correctly” describe or address a **??**.
Seems to me that the **??** race collectively have a gigantic chip on their shoulders about being what they are.
I can’t help it if I’m white and they’re **??*’s.
Maybe, at the end of the day, they want to be called White ?

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 20:38:46 +0000

Ian, can I watch?

By: Stephanie Z

Stephanie Z — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 20:19:25 +0000

Ian, you might want to stop and think a minute before calling anyone by their “proper term.” You wouldn’t want them to turn around and do the same to you, would you?

By: Ian

Ian — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 16:24:21 +0000

Black young people call themselves nigger and nigga or whatever but because of the color of my skin I’m supposed to call them something else ?? I tell them to go to hell. I’m going to call them negro now and I will call them negros.

If they are ashamed to be called by their proper term, they need to put up or shut up. I’ve never seen any one stop blacks calling whites as “whitey” or “cracker” etc in music, radio or tv.

Barak Obama is president, we might as well start calling thees people niggers.

By: Jim Thomerson

Jim Thomerson — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:22:19 +0000

I was mildly bemused to see two Venezuelan friends great each other as “Gordo” and “Negro”. In 1969, a Venezuelan friend told me, “There is no racism in Venezuela. It just happens that all the poor people have dark skins.” However, last time I was there, mid-90’s, there were a good many light-skinned poor folks. But, is this really social progress?

By: MPL

MPL — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:13:07 +0000

Frankly, I don’t understand why the Census bureau doesn’t collect the demographic data through modern polling techniques. I know they’re Constitutionally required to do a comprehensive count, but there’s no reason they couldn’t collect the demographics separately, and they could collect with higher quality methodologies.

I know I would be much more interested in what 100,000 randomly chosen Americans said in open response to a question about racial, ethnic, national and family history than what 300,000,000 Americans filled in on a scantron sheet.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:56:04 +0000

MPL, I think you are right. I think they should not be using the word “Negro” on the form, but the reason they are doing it is because there are boneheads in administrative positions in the census bureau, and that is not the biggest issue we have to deal with.

By: MPL

MPL — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:53:52 +0000

I think this is an interesting case (like most controversial issues) where the words themselves start to upstage other, non-verbal issues. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t use care with our words, just that we should be careful about other things too.

Words get an unfair advantage for our attention, because we use them to communicated. It’s extremely easy to have a conversation in words about the words used on the census form. It’s much harder to have a conversation about the methodology of counting people and districting having a systematically skewed impact on specific groups of people.

The policies that have the largest impacts on race, gender, and class are ones that target innocuous sounding proxies for those variables. Unfortunately, these issues are often hard to understand, never mind fix.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 12:06:42 +0000

Frank (21) I think the Fighting Sioux made a deal to change the name based on the determination of the Sioux elders or council in their area, who said “Fighting Sioux” was OK. Of course, over here in my neck of the wouds. “Sioux” is derogatory and incorrect, among the people who do not call them selves Sioux (the Lakota, for instance).