Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

by Emmanuel Acho

“The ultimate logic of racism,” Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “is genocide.”

getting uncomfortable is the whole idea. Everything great is birthed through discomfort.

IN HIS POEM “Let America Be America Again,” Langston Hughes writes, “O, let America be America Again / The land that never has been yet.” Hughes published these words in 1936, almost twenty years before the civil rights movement, a time when he had strong reason to critique America for not fulfilling its promise.

According to my Teachers, I am now an African-American. They call me out of my name. BLACK is an open umbrella. I am a Black and A Black forever. I am one of The Blacks. —GWENDOLYN BROOKS, “I AM A BLACK”

We must never forget that the lion’s share of people of African descent living in this country had ancestors that were seized from their homeland and stripped of the core parts of their identities: kinship ties, links to a tribe, language, and so on. That they suffered a hellish journey. That when they reached the shores of what became America, they became something less than human—legally—and were deprived of the most important things that made them, them. We must never lose sight of the fact that this torture went on for hundreds of years, until the end of the Civil War, and even beyond it (remember what I said about Juneteenth).

Colored reigned supreme into the early twentieth century and can still be found in the name of what might be the most important black organization of all time: the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909).

After the late 1960s, black came into its own. One of the main arguments for using black was that it created a parallel with white. (Which, side note, is also an invented term—European immigrants didn’t arrive here saying, “White and proud”!)

To the extent I can speak for anyone else: black is the most inclusive choice. Here’s Gwendolyn Brooks again, this time from her poem “Primer for Blacks”: The word Black has geographic power, pulls everybody in: Blacks here— Blacks there— Blacks wherever they may be.

BLACK COVERS THE descendants of the people who were brought over on slave ships and forced to work on plantations and also includes people like my parents, who immigrated to the United States. It covers all the black people in the United States and also joins them with people of African descent in Brazil, the Caribbean, Mexico (the diaspora), and other countries where the transatlantic slave trade brought Africans. It’s a descriptor of what black people all have in common.