As a white woman who once taught Black History to hundreds of elementary school students and Diversity Education to hundreds of high school teachers and college students, it’s important to me to keep abreast of “culturally correct” language in the groups I subscribe to be knowledgeable about. Retired now, and largely homebound, I find it takes a fair amount of effort to do so — things change quickly in our media-hungry technical world. Just think about the terms “woke” and “karen,” both words that originated in the Black community.
I’m no longer hanging out at national conferences or interacting in person with diverse groups of folks, having lively conversations in various venues. It’s down to books and journals, reading and blogs for me now. It’s down to listening and learning with intent.
Like at Black Kos, which is a group that meets here at Daily Kos, every Tuesday and Friday at 5:00 pm EST. 2:00 pm PST.
I’ve learned so much there in the last five years. More than I ever imagined there was to know.
This week I learned a little more from the best teacher and one of the best friends I’ve ever had.
I’d like to pass it on. It’s actually simple.
Don’t label me a “person of color”. I’m a Black woman.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I’ve addressed being dubbed “non-white” in the past, in “I am not 'non-white” — a term that centers “whiteness;’ making it clear that I am Black. I also reject being thrown into the catch-all demographic category “poc” (people of color) which defines everyone who doesn’t fit into the “white” classification. I also grit my teeth every time I hear Black people, or Black folks, or the Black community referred to as “the blacks,” which is an echo of the “the niggers” (Yes — I spelled it out).
www.dailykos.com/...
It’s hard to keep up. I understand. We will continue to hear people refer to Black people as blacks. Or a black. As if we would describe any other man or woman as a white or even a brown. “Two browns and a white worked for the black.”
This issue has been around for at least a decade that I know of, though I have only this year really stopped and heard it from people I know and care about. In 2015, Slate magazine
May 19, 2015 — Advocates for enslaved person claim that slave imagines slavery as an internal or even metaphysical condition, not an imposed and arbitrary one.
Yes, we will continue to find hundreds of thousands of books that refer to Black enslaved people as slaves. But every Black person that lived was not enslaved and enslavement was not who they were; further it was an imposed condition, not a chosen one. Recent arguments focus on how enslavement is an adjective and slave is a noun. It shouldn’t be too hard to see how that tracks in our country’s collective psyche, at least not here on DKos.
Now out there in the big world? We will see different opinions.
This differentiation between calling a a slave an enslaved person is Not To Be Confused with the Right’s temptation to paint slavery with a minimalist’s brush by calling it “Involuntary Relocation.” There’s a fine line here, as usual, where some people are going to tip too far. Here is a link to an article that I fear does just that.
Involuntary relocation and enslaved person are misguided euphemisms.
www.theatlantic.com/...
I wrote a diary a month or two ago about capitalizing the B in Black when talking about Black people and this addresses that issue as well. These are guidelines that come directly from “senior slavery scholars of color” who community-sourced. In the comments of my last diary, there was too much discussion about why or if Black should be capitalized and why or if white should be. In the end, we/I determined that people should get to determine how they themselves will be called. If you are white, or White, or whyte, and you have a problem with any of this...you may want to ask yourself why.
If you are a white, pink, brown, or other toned person and you can’t be bothered with it, I would like to ask you why.
The best resource I found on this was at naacpculpeper.org/…Writing About Slavery? Teaching About Slavery?
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Senior slavery scholars of color community-sourced this short guide to share with and be used by editors, presses, museums, journalists, and curricular projects as well as with teachers, writers, curators, and public historians. Considering the legal, demographic and other particularities of institutions of slavery in various parts of the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia, and also considering how slavery changed over time, this guide is a set of suggestions that raises questions and sensitivities rather than serving as a checklist that enforces any set of orthodoxies.
This document is offered in the spirit of Laura Adderly’s response to it; all words we “know to talk about enslaved people of African descent in these Americas prove insufficient, both for the brutality against them, and for their remarkable overcoming.” This document helps us in our grappling to describe and analyze the intricacies and occurrences of domination, coercion, resistance, and survival under slavery. It complicates the assumptions embedded in language that have been passed down and normalized. Depending on context, some words clarify, some obscure. For that reason, as one contributor put it, this is a “worthy language struggle.” Those who have contributed to this crowdsourced guide include leading and upcoming scholars in the field of slavery studies. They come together to make this intervention in the spirit of building ethical community.
During the time of document generation, please feel free to add not only to the checklist but to its goals, objectives, organization, scope, etc. Afterward, please see contact below.
Language to Consider Adopting/Preferred Terms:
- Enslaved (Africans, people, mothers, workers, artisans, children, etc).
- Using enslaved (as an adjective) rather than “slave” (as a noun) disaggregates the condition of being enslaved with the status of “being” a slave. People weren’t slaves; they were enslaved.
- Captive (Africans, fathers, families, workers, infants, etc). Note that this term nuances depending on geography vis-a-vis the slave trade, as Ana Lucia Araujo notes.
- Enslaver (rather than many of the terms below).
- The term “master” transmits the aspirations and values of the enslaving class without naming the practices they engaged.
Language to Consider Avoiding:
- Slave master (see above)
- Slave mistress and enslaved mistress (to name sexual violence/relations/conditions)
- Slave breeding/breeders (for forced reproduction)
- Slave concubine and enslaved concubine
- Slaveholder
- Slave owner
- Alternatives: those who claimed people as property, those who held people in slavery, etc.
- Planter (when referring to enslavers)
only of sovereignty but also of political agency on the ground. For example, abolition in Cuba does not occur until 1886, when it was still a colony of Spain.
- Be aware of shifting allegiances with regards to national identities as claimed by the people on the ground themselves: if a child was born free in Western Africa, captured and traded to Havana, and lives the majority of his adult life in New Orleans, how would you describe him? Understand and highlight his multilingual, diasporic, multiple existence.
Practices to Adopt: (for editors/journals, etc).
- Accept when scholars capitalize Black; please don’t argue with them.
- Accept when scholars use the term “enslaver”; please don’t use its “inelegance” or “awkwardness” as a reason to ask for revisions.
- Accept when scholars want to italicize or place in quotation marks the vocabulary of racial taxonomies, i.e. “mulatto, “quadroon,” “octoroon,” etc.
- Consider “nation,” “language group” or “ethnicity” instead of “tribe.” “Newspaper articles, student papers, tweets, Facebook posts discussing the slave trade often refer to African “tribes” whereas none of the pieces refer to French or British [or Dutch or Portgueese] tribes,” notes scholar Ana Lucia Araujo.
- Accept when scholars of slavery in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking areas do not want to italicize racial taxonomies within an essay written in English, and instead want to simply write negro, pardo, mulato, etc. Italics mark difference (see below).
by P. Gabrielle Foreman, et al. “Writing about Slavery/Teaching About Slavery: This Might Help” community-sourced document.
There is more if you want to know more at the original article, which is free to share with attribution.
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Using the term POC
This is a difficult one for me, as a white person, to navigate. I’m so glad Denise Oliver Velez helped explain the frustration for Black folk with it’s usage earlier this week. It makes so much sense. Even the more inclusive BIPOC (Black Indigenous People Of Color) doesn’t suffice, and that was never going to catch on, though, as I understand it, the idea to highlight the most egregiously oppressed “people of color” in this country was well-intentioned. The reluctance to fall into this catch-all phrase is not new.
And it’s not going away.
I asked Denise myself for a better way to refer to multiple groups of “othered” non-white groups. This was her response.
I’d probably say “Black folks and other groups affected by white supremacy” or “targeted by white supremacists” or something along those lines.
I’m trying to stay away from POC — simply because Ramaswamy and others like him are “poc” — which sucks
I suppose the safest, most appropriate, but not the easiest, would be to ask the folks we are talking to how they prefer to be referred to. Wouldn’t that be a hoot.
If you have other ideas, I’d like to hear them.