We should replace the words "Black," "mixed race," "people of color" and even "African American" with "nigger."
This may seem like a radical, even "racist" (another word we could do without) proposal, but I would argue it's really not such because those terms all in fact mean the same thing the word "nigger" has always meant. If we had to use "nigger" rather than more socially acceptable terms, we might be forced to acknowledge those words are just ways of preserving the status quo while pretending we are doing the opposite. Folk in the segregationist South used to use "nigger" with contempt but also just to indicate someone of African and therefore slave descent (viz. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn). In the North the word has always meant, well, nigger.
"People of color" is the latest attempt to come up with a way of not saying "nigger" while actually meaning "nigger." The first time I heard the phrase, I thought the speaker was trying to be funny. But they weren't. They were, consciously or not, saying "nigger" without saying it. To add insult to injury, they use the phrase to indicate all people who are not "White," as if Arabs, Latinos, Asians, and people who have African ancestry (even if they look "White") all share a common social status, as if "Blacks" were just another ethnic group—with deep tans.
In 1935 when the Federal Housing Administration got into the business of guaranteeing mortgages for millions of new American home owners, there was no such delusion. Everyone who was not "Negro" qualified for a mortgage. Asians, Mexicans, even East Indians were not excluded from what turned out to be the greatest engine of American wealth and opportunity for working people in its history: a house. It also made everyone who was not Negro (i.e., a "nigger") White or at least an honorary White. Good schools and other middle-class amenities, along with the inevitable intermarriage that takes place when people live in the same neighborhood, did the rest. You can hate the person your son or daughter has married, but nobody hates their grandchildren.
I put "racist" in quotes above. That's because the word itself implies racism, as Patrick Wolfe, the Australian anthropologist, has pointed out. Race implies some kind of important difference, in the American sense a difference of color, but it could also mean a difference of origin, even remote origin. In any case, it begs the question, "different how?" If the answer matters socially, such as who can marry whom without raising eyebrows, it means there is a difference that goes more than skin deep. And if such a difference exists, it must involve some kind of qualitative difference. And that's racism.
American "Blacks" intermarry with so-called Whites at a rate of four percent. Other "people of color" marry Whites at much higher rates: Latinos, 15 percent; Japanese, 30 percent; other Asian, 13 percent; American Indians, 45 percent. Most so-called Latinos have African ancestry, but they regularly check "White" on census forms and, in any case, are not seen as "Black." Nor are East Indians. All of these and just about anyone who wasn't White-White, meaning British or northern German, were not even honorary Whites until the FHA housing policy made them such. The Irish were in fact a "race" considered non-White in America for more than a hundred years.
Why does it matter so much what words we use? And why do I suggest such a radical substitute for those euphemisms? I do so because words imply a reality that words designate, and we can't have it both ways. We can't hope to eliminate discrimination if we think there is something to be discriminated, even if we do so with good will. If we had to use the word "nigger" in all instances when we want to identify someone as different, however benignly, we would feel embarrassed. And that's good, because it might bring home that we cannot make a "racial" distinction with regard to people of African descent (and, no, I don't think that phrase is any better than any of the others) without making a distinction between them and the rest of us. Which is just what the FDA did, and what we still do.
The truth is, in the US you are either Black or not-Black. All other distinctions are not absolute and are negotiable. "Blacks" are a caste, not just a "racial" or social group. They are, like most humans, of mixed ancestry (even in Africa the average non-African descent is five percent). But they are different in a way like no other people in America. They, most of them, participate in a common culture called "Black" (the word was their own choice, to replace "Negro" because the latter was the word used by racists and non-racists alike). "Black is beautiful," "Black and proud" were attempts to remove the negative baggage attached not only to "Negro" but to other words like "colored."
"Blacks" do in fact have a culture as well as a language different from the rest of the population. That's because they have had to live apart from the rest of society for hundreds of years. Saying "Black is beautiful" was an attempt to affirm their culture as valid and important rather than as something to feel ashamed of. The assertion worked. "Black" became a positive affirmation. But a consequence has also been to continue the distinction between "Black" and non-Black that made segregation and discrimination possible in the first place. If it had not done so, the intermarriage rate would not have held steady for so many decades at plus or minus four percent. Intermarriage was, in fact, higher in pre-Civil War days.
In South Carolina and Louisiana, while there existed a third social class of mixed "race" or "Colored," there was no delusion about the purity of "White" blood. There was more mingling and more of a common life in those Southern states than there was in the North. Much of the Jim Crow discrimination created after Reconstruction did not exist in public transportation and parks, for example. A "Negro" could and did ride in the same train carriage as a "White," while in Massachusetts they had to ride in a separate one. When the first segregationist laws were being passed, the editor of a Southern newspaper asked (I'm paraphrasing), "What's next, separate drinking fountains?"
Until we have actual integration in this country, no euphemism can paper over the reality that we are a nation divided into two castes. Calling an East Indian a Dalit instead of an "untouchable" does nothing for eliminating their inferior social status unless there is a real transformation of their status. American cities are more segregated in 2024 than they were in 1934. "Black" income is about 60 percent of "Whites." "Black" wealth is between five and ten percent of "White" wealth (largely based on home-ownership and down even further thanks to the depression of 2008-2009 caused by financial institutions scamming the most vulnerable, disproportionately "Black" home buyers).
Who are we kidding? You can't paint over a social reality like it's just an ugly stain on a canvas of otherwise perfect equality. It's past time we acknowledged that. Time and past time.
