I’m So Glad “Black” is Back!
This is written from Minneapolis, city of George Floyd’s murder, where I live. It’s the site of a shameful, inexcusable crime by those who were sworn to protect, and it wasn’t the first unjustified police killing of a Black person here by any means. But it’s also a birthplace of hope, amid all the suffering and uproar, from which an uncompromising new justice movement continues to reach around the world. And while the fact that Black people, most often men, were regularly murdered by police was not news to a lot of people (mostly Black), it seems to have finally penetrated the consciousness of a whole bunch of others (mostly White), who were either entirely unaware or at least didn’t give it a high priority among the cornucopia of miseries and disasters we hear about every day.
I’m a words buff, and since the murder, I’ve noticed a pleasing change in the American lexicon. Have you noticed that “Black” is back? With the capital letter? I’ve been stubbornly using this for decades, though rarely seeing anyone else use it, at least in mainstream media. If you’re old enough, you’ve seen the polite or standard U.S. word for people of African descent change from “negro” (at a time when “black” was considered insulting) to “colored” to “Black” to “Afro-American” to “African American” to “black” without the cap, and sometimes to “people of color,” while “colored people” was still deemed offensive. (I kind of liked “Afro-American” but some people decided it “sounded like a hairdo,” so out it went.) As a 60s/70’s person, I associate capital-B-Black with the Black Pride movement and the James Brown song “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud”. (“We’d rather die on our feet than keep livin’ on our knees.”) It also evokes, for me, heroes from W.E.B. DuBois to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz), a slew of writers, and great movies that came later but had a similar spirit, including three master works of history, sociology, and the human heart: John Singleton’s thoughtful Higher Learning and Boyz n’ the Hood and Spike Lee’s towering epic Do the Right Thing*.
The only problem I have around capital-B-Black is that, as a fussy amateur grammarian, I have to resolve the equivalence issue: If I’m gonna write “Black,” I should right “White,” at least if they occur in the same paragraph. But for right now, I won’t. Looking at the nightmarish things Black people have been through from micro-aggressions and insults to across-the-board denial of opportunity and theft of their labor to false imprisonment, murder, and torture, I think Black people should get the effing capital letter and white people can just do without it.**
Full disclosure: I’m not Black. I look white and have fully benefited from white privilege. But sometimes who we are doesn’t quite fit with how we look, and I’ve learned from the awesome Black people I’ve known over the years. In the 70s my partner was Black and a bunch of our friends and family were too. In the 90s, a five-year-old named Steven offered to be my “African ancestor” since I was sad that I didn’t have any, and I took him up on it. (He also taught me to catch a baseball at short range, and I’d waited 40 years for that little piece of knowledge to come my way.) And back in the day, before I lost my enculturation, at least three Black people told me that I too was Black, including the fellow court reporter who surprised a small room full of people by announcing, “It’s okay, she’s one of us!” and a woman friend who stopped suddenly in the middle of a rant on the evils of white people to tell me, “I’m sorry, I forgot you was white.” There was also a man whose exact words I can’t remember, but to whom I replied joking-for-serious, “You guys should get together and issue passports so people would know we (who had passed the unwritten tests) were okay.” He said, with some emphasis, “Who’d want one?” and I replied, “I would!” Genetically, I have 1% Southern Bantu ethnicity, and while this and a dime will not get me a cup of coffee, it makes me happy.
May the change come! May the change come soon! Too many have suffered and continue to suffer. It has taken too long.
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*Of course this leaves out many wonderful movies of which I must include three more personal favorites: Brother from Another Planet, BlacKkKlansman, and Get Out. (I will not mention Pootie Tang, I will not mention Pootie Tang . . .)
**One of the saddest things I ever read was a scene from a James Baldwin book (The Fire Next Time?) or possibly Langston Hughes, where a white man smashes a Black teenager’s new bicycle with the comment, “Aint no n-word gonna have a bike that’s better’n mine!” It’s all just so cruel and heartbreaking and abysmally stupid.
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