Antiracists reclaimed ‘Black’ while assimilationists clung to ‘Negro’

Evidence

Assimilationists were negatively loading the terms “model minority” and “ghetto” with racist associations in 1966. Meanwhile, antiracists were quickly extracting negative associations from the identifier “Black,” foremost among them Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael had been born in Trinidad in 1941, and he had moved to the Bronx in 1952, the same year his idol, Malcolm X, was paroled from prison. In 1964, Carmichael graduated from Howard University. By then, Malcolm’s disciples, Carmichael included, were loading the old identifier, “Negro,” with accommodation and assimilation—and removing ugliness and evil from the old identifier, “Black.” They were now passionately embracing the term “Black,” which stunned Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Negro” disciples and their own assimilationist parents and grandparents, who would rather be called “nigger” than “Black.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 995

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete instance of Kendi’s three-way scheme: ‘Negro’ encoded assimilationist accommodation, ‘Black’ encoded antiracist pride—language choice is ideological position.
• CANDY: The detail that some assimilationists preferred ‘nigger’ over ‘Black’ is a striking, compact anecdote for conversation.
• XREF: connects to: Assimilationist anti-racism both erased black-white difference and homogenized black peoples — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1189