Don’t Call Me “Person Of Color”!

We’re approaching the end of Black History Month, not “People of Color Month”.

We celebrate, recall and remember the good deeds, the historicalness of Blackness in the shortest month of the year. We recognize the Blackness of America during February under a concept conceived by Black historian Carter G. Woodson.

Companies buy ads to commercialize their good gifts to American Negroes in token fashion. N’DIGO had a car company this year call and ask if we would cover gifts of coats and boots to the Negro poor.

I said hell no, we won’t. Such a token! I said when I called you to discuss year-round advertising, you didn’t even return my call. I was ignored and now I give less than a damn about your coats and boots. Why not give the poor a car? How about that?

Every few decades, Black people get new names, assigned by white people, usually white liberal types. The latest is “people of color.”

With the election of Barack Obama, the Washington Post euphorically claimed that we had reached the pinnacle of Americanism by being a non-racial society. It demonstrated clearly that the Post was existing in a very tall ivory tower that was missing the ground level.

We have been Negro, colored, African, People of African Descent, Black, African American and now People of Color. Of course there is the ever present word, “nigger”.

Black people have put an “a” at the end of it, supposedly to destigmatize the word so that we we can call our own selves “niggas”. So we have taken took the word of insult and degradation and made it a word of endearment in some instances, as when we say lovingly, “You my nigga.”

The politically correct term in American society has now become “The N Word.” There is no f-ing “N word”; the word is nigger. To make the derogatory term a letter is to take the sting out of the word and still allow white people to use it.

And dear white people, no there is never a time that you can use the word, because your great grandparents used it too often and maliciously, so it is taboo for you to use today. You don’t understand, but we do. It is the word of fight and we cannot, will not, explain.

Racial identity in America is important. We talk about equality and freedom and equal opportunity and it is a dream still. The gaps in America exist widely even if there has been a Black president.

He was not purely a Black American, however; he was a biracial American, married to a purely Black American. Her heritage notes slavery, his does not. This is an aspect of Blackness that America wrestles with.

How much Black is enough? How should Black look? Should there be braids and dreads and naps in the work place or not? What happens when Black kids strike the streets with their jeans, hoodies and leisurewear; are they stereotyped as thugs?

The stereotypes exist. I recall the days of the Bulls, when Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen played. They always appeared before and after their games all suited up, as in GQ.

I asked them about that one day and the reply was that when they left the surroundings of the United Center, they were Black men on the street, not necessarily the admired ball players. Better to be in a suit than not.

The Name Game
It is important for people to define themselves and not get swept up into the mainstream racial identification game. I resent the name change seemingly every decade.

I consider us to be Black Americans or African Americans. “People of color” is all encompassing of people with brown to black pigmentation of skin. Hawaiians, Polynesians, Indians, Puerto Ricans can all be the same color, but their culture and heritage make them different. Same with Black Americans – skin color is not ethnic definition.

My friend Paul King called me late one night as he was reading the New York Times to ask had he missed something. He said that in one of America’s leading newspapers, the term “people of color” had been used a dozen times on one page and he resented it.

Who are they talking about, he asked. I said they are talking about us. We dissected the meaning, the implication of the new term, for about 30 minutes. People of color are not who we are nor what we claim to be.

The term person of color is absent of any nationality or ethnicity or even individual humanity. It is simply code that someone is not white. The term makes it is easy for white people to identify who is not them and just lump everybody in a comfortable box of not being them.

It is very much like another term that I detest – “minorities.” Who is a minor person? Everybody is a minor person, or a person of color, except white people, at least in the minds of white people.

When the slave master beat the slave, hung the slave, lynched the slave, raped the slave, and captured the runaway slave, he was not working with people of color. He was calling, labeling and naming “niggers”, not people of color.

The racial names change and become fashionable through the years as social progress is made. We have also been: mulattos, picaninnies, mixed race, ethnic, sambos, coons, porch monkeys, exotic, and a host of other racial identifications. Some of these terms have become derogatory as the years have gone by.

It’s A Cultural Thing
So, now here we are in 2020 and “people of color” is the in-vogue term. But, an Italian is an Italian. A Swede is a Swede. A German is a German. An African is an African. These names are reflective as people of their country standing the test of time, in 1619 to 2020. The African-American name changes as you read the history books and watch the romantic slave story.

There are things that white people never ever will understand about Black people, that is Black American people who are of African descent born in this country. It doesn’t matter how free, how liberal, how nice, how Christian they are.

There are just some things unique to the culture, the upbringing, that is for internal consumption only. I think each culture has this ingrained factor, Native Americans and Jewish people for example.

As I write this, I am explaining and hope I don’t offend, but white people, please cease and desist calling Black people, people of color. We are Black Americans. We are African Americans. But damn, “people of color” does not apply.