When Fannie Hurst included a stereotyped mammy figure in her best-selling novel "Imitation of Life," Zora Neale Hurston, once close to Hurst, wrote an essay titled "You Don't Know Us Negroes," criticizing books by white writers that "made out they were holding a looking glass to the Negro" but "had everything in them but Negroness".
You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes.
"About the last of August," hewrote, "came a Dutch man of war that sold us twenty Negroes".
My elementary school music teacher taught us every negro spiritual known to man, so I'm very familiar with them.
While I cannot speak on behalf of everyone in my community, in my experience, truthfully, the terms African-American and Black are so interchangeable that most Blacks won't be offended whichever term you use to describe us, as long as you don't refer to us as a Negro or, God forbid, the N-word.
"A brief experience showed us that the Negro people were capable of education, with no limit that men could set to their capacity," he wrote.
We've let some names go that we felt were holding us back (colored, Negro) and taken on others to show our pride (black, Afro American and African American) but we haven't been able to let that one go.
As Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told President Dwight Eisenhower, other nations vilified us for our treatment of "negroes" as less-than-first-class citizens.
He reminded us in the 20th century that Negroes had no permanent friends or permanent enemies, only "permanent interests". He said that your "enemy" today, could be your "friend" tomorrow.
Communications watchdog Ofcom said 233 people complained about the actor, who was given a formal warning by show bosses for using "unacceptable language" after he called US singer Alexander O'Neal a "negro".
"Most of those Negroes along the way have joined us, and although this Wallace-baiting sounds like a little boy whose big brother has come home and who is standing outside a bully's window just to jeer, these Negroes are never going to be quite so afraid of the bully again.
