On the UNCF and NAACP

'Slap In The Face'? 'Negro' Is On 2010 Census; Update: It's Been There Before



Excerpt:

The Census Bureau says it includes "Negro" as a way for individuals to classify their race in the 2010 Census because some older African-Americans wrote it on their forms in 2000.

But many African-Americans find it insulting.

-- "It's almost like a slap in the face," Nikyle Fitzgerald tells WTOL in Toledo.

-- "I am a little offended," Dawud Ingram says to WCBS-TV.

-- "It's a bad vibe word," Kevin Bishop says in the New York Daily News.

Comment:

The United Negro College Fund (UNCF)

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, usually abbreviated as NAACP

"Negro" definition

More: I had my face slapped by my Father back in the 50's for calling someone a "n*gger" I was sitting in the back seat of our '54 Ford wagon and we were driving in the "colored area" of Fort Wayne Indiana (where we lived at the time). I don't remember specifically what I said but I know that the sentence included the "N-word". I might have been 7 or 8. The Ford wagons weren't much bigger than a compact car back then. Dad's big arm swung from the front drivers seat to the back seat an his hand landed hard and fast on my little pink face. There was a lesson learned! Dad said ... "they are negros!". At 60 I have so few memories from the 50's .... I remember the birth of my brother in 1953. Buying the '54 Ford in ... 1954 .... and I'm sure scores of others. But that hand slap was an education. It's wrong to be a racist. It is wrong denigrate another based upon race. I agree with Martin Luther King, Jr. - "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin". I'm not going to do that. This isn't a new thing ... goes back more than 50 years.

I'm come to understand theologically that there is but one human race! And we are all descended from Adam. Answers in Genesis has a great article about that: Are there really different races?

I used the "N-Word" ... not the one mentioned above ... but the "Negro" word in the late '60's and got a figurative hand slap from a black man who told me indignantly that they were not Negros but black people. I'm ok with that too but to all black Americans you really more tan than black. I know black ... one of my best friends is Joseph, a co-worker from Nigeria!

By the way, I am an Uncle to three black Americans. I love the like my other nieces and nephews and pray for them by name!

Of course the other race denominator is "African American". I suggest that most African Americans about about as African as my wife is German, my Sister-in-law is Irish or I am English. Most of us have been here long enough to just be Americans. It's interesting that the Somalis I know don't call themselves African Americans.

Maybe it's time to just drop the "race" question all together! I'd like to think Martin Luther King Jr. might just smile!