In Defense of Negroes

Some years ago, I began my remedial English class with what I believed was a slam dunk: Richard Wright’s autobiographical sketches, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.” We were just getting into annotation techniques, so this was definitely an ambitious text to begin with. To be sure, the space and place in the writing was often unfamiliar to students, though the racial violence articulated certainly wasn’t—stop and frisk New York was full of episodes racial violence against Black and brown bodies. 

For me, one of the more painful parts of teaching Wright, love him as I do, was a matter of idiom. Wright is of a different era in America—for him, Black folks weren’t “Black” or “African-American”---they were “Negroes.” And as a self respecting person proud of his race and teaching all students of color, I just had to say something. 

 “It’s ok for Wright to use “Negro,” I’d tell my writing class, citing the early 20th century depicted, “but you should studiously avoid it. It’s offensive.” And that would be that—offense mitigated!  

In Wright’s world, “Negroes” were subject to police brutality. They were beaten for “looking like they might do something", castrated for the mere suspicion of miscegenation, and brutally oppressed for “putting on airs” by using vocabulary that seemed “above” them. Wright talks about his learning to dissemble and outright lie in the Jim Crow south as a way of surviving his youth. 

But, when Wright moves north to Memphis from Mississippi, and then eventually to Chicago and New York, he is still marginalized. In Black Boy, Wright tells us that the “Negroes” around him are wage workers, low paid with few prospects for social mobility. Many are under educated, living in squalid ghetto conditions. Others are incarcerated. Wright himself suffers from food insecurity, terrible housing, poor health care, and a world that seems destined to snuff out the light of him and his dark skinned community. 

By the 1960s, Wright had died (after becoming an expat having moved to Paris some years before), but America still continued on with “Negro.” It was a hopeful era.  Kennedy announced in his inaugural address at the top of the decade that the USA would go to the moon by the end of the decade, and through ingenuity, political will, astronomical capital  (get it?), leftover Nazi personnel, and maybe a little dumb luck, we did it—we were moon bouncers by July of 1969!

 “Negroes” of the era had a ton of gains that old folks of all ilks love to gloat about. Lots of legislation was passed. Voting! Fair Housing! And yet caste oppression cemented into an” intractable problem” in the middle of the civil rights movement.

In many cases, Black folks still lived in squalid conditions, unable to get loans, stymied from getting higher education and higher paid jobs.  Many “Negroes”  were mourning the death of Malcolm (shot) and Martin (shot) and Bobby (shot) and all the boys who went to war for a country whose founding document, the constitution, makes him 3/5ths of a man (shot shot shot).  We’d figured out how to safely carry humans more than two-hundred-thousand miles from Earth, but somehow, truly changing the abhorrent living conditions of Black Americans—well, it just couldn’t be done.

The 1980s was a transformative decade: Martin Luther King day was given to us. The Ivy League was heavy into affirmative action, and Michelle got into Princeton. Barack eventually went to Columbia. Political ads always featured a Black face somewhere, and Michael Jackson became the biggest star ever. Oh, and, we weren’t “Negroes” any more. Thanks to folks like Jesse Jackson, we were now African-Americans, seven syllables over 2 words to replace that old “Negro.”  

By the 90s, Michelle and Barack? They’d graduated from Harvard Law! Yes, the 80s crack epidemic had spilled into 90s crack mass incarceration. Sure, the living conditions in public housing in many cities were absolutely horrific. Ok, Property taxes soared, leaving many Black folks, still living on the margins, with terribly funded schools. Alright, Rodney King was assaulted by the police, and he was just the most high profile case of the decade. We weren’t “Negroes,” Goddammit. Celebrate that fact. We certainly did in the 2000s and 2010s!

Two years ago, in 2020, after George Floyd was murdered and Breonna Taylor was murdered and Ahmaud Arbery was murdered—this was a few years after Sandra Bland was murdered and 12 year old Tamir Rice was murdered and teens Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were murdered and Eric Garner was murdered—two years ago, we really hit the jackpot. Juneteenth became a national holiday. Post office is closed. African Americanas mourned John Lewis’s death and talked about “good trouble” with white allies everywhere. Portland white folks lost their minds with all that chanting and marching for Black folks. Oh yes, we weren’t just African-Americans that summer: we were Black, and our lives mattered too. One could see it by the spray painted BLM signs on the street, as faded now in memory as it is on the pavement, trampled under foot or rolled over by cars. Black Lives Matter!

Armed with a new federal holiday and a new honorific, America kept right along incarcerating Blacks, killing Blacks, relegating Blacks to terrible schools and squalid housing, and limiting our life chances. But, and really, I can’t stress this enough, especially to my students: “The term ‘Negro’ is offensive.” 

It is offensive because it recalls the violence of the Jim Crow south. Of the limitations imposed on Black folks up north. Of the seeming indifference to actually change structures of oppression, Black president or not. It is offensive because it calls out our white supremacist nation that did not need a white supremacist in the Whitehouse to firmly and consistently espouse those values. It is offensive because it exposes a secret that’s not really so hush-hush: That America is more interested in changing the title of my subjugated caste than it is in actually overturning the heinous conditions of my oppression. The will that sent us to the stars some fifty-odd years ago does not exist to liberate me from my subjugation. “Negro” is offensive because it is jussst right, a little too“on the nose.” I am a Negro. And so too are many of my students.