Take 'Em to Task: Negro

[Smiley and West]

While Gwyneth Paltrow receives criticism for tweeting the "N" word, a listener from Southern California takes Smiley to task for his use of the word "Negro".

[Margo Green]

Well said in all that you said…. I prefer Africa American, not black because black is a color not a race…..

We can’t be defined by color…i have no problem with no word Negro.... just not call me that other N word. just junking ....thank you....

 

[Aaron]

Hi everyone !  

Now I do not have dates or history facts 

The planet is a big diversity natives lands etc.

The white people ( why i have to say white pople ?)

But they classified us ( why because they made systems to organize us )  For their wealth

The continent America ; is divide in 3 parts north, Central ,South Why media go to America as a whole land?

Native is native we have way to respect o approach between Native So white imposing their way to fake apologies, Insults etc

my opinion is find the great world to express the beauty of all people

According to ancient real people    

[James Edward Clipper Jr]

Negro, Negra, Negroid. Neither of them actually define our true heritage as Israelites. Nigger, Niger, Nigerian. Afro American is a pseudo derrogatory identification. Africa is not the original name of that continent. Biblically the land of Canaan is the appropiate identity.

My people perish for the lack of knowledge. Because we reject knowledge Yahweh has rejected us. Four hundred years wondering in a land without true identity is longer than anticipated. It would behoove us all to connect with true heritage by DNA evidence. Perhaps this reorientation would give us a more balanced ideology of our purpose toward mankind as a whole. Until then, we continue to be recycled through the penal system, public entitlements and racial indifferences both inwardly and outwardly.

We need but take a brief moment to restrospect our community to see Willie Lynch written all over our various mentalities. We cannot know our destiny until we identify with our origins. The only thing worse than failure is not to try.

[Sandra Phillips]

I like African American.  I haven't gotten to American yet.  Black is the opposite of white and there is no need to polarize the races beyond what we are already. Negro is Latin for Black. Colored? Who isn't colored? I guess these are all better than darkie, but we are the darker race.

[Ricardo Jones]

Doc S, who got your massiah's (obama) his first job out of harvard at Sibley and Austin? Henry Kissenger. What about that Doc?

[Ricardo Jones]

I must correct some of my previous statements. The president did appoint Daley as his chief of staff at the whitehouse. The corrupt Daley family connection to the obama's are thur Michelle Robinson-obama who was an assist to Mayor Daley.  I stand corrected. So I understand better about the connect between the Daley family and the Robinson-obama family. The president also worked for the Chicago Law Firm of Miner, Barnhill & Gallard as a civil rights lawyer. The president also work in the Business Sector for two years somewhere? He taught at U of Chicago Law School.

Know matter what there's a connection to the corrupt Daley family on both sides of the obama's.

Cronyism is clear practices of the obama's.

[Ricardo Jones]

Obama pick for NLRB was top lawyer for union tainted by mob ties, history of corruption:

 

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/06/22/obama-pick-for-nlrb-unio...

[Ricardo Jones]

Its clear to me that after reviewing Michelle Robinson-obama Bio that she was a member of the Daley crew. I mean she apart of the most politically corrupt family in this country (The Daley's). Once a member of the Daley's always a member of the Daley's gang. Look at all the positions she had from harvard law school and the salaries she recieved. Involved with Americorp to funnel money. Worked at U of Chicago along with her husband. Involved with an intern when she was a member of sibley & austin's managerment. Check out her families estate holdings.  

[Ricardo Jones]

We as Black people have to think past the obama's. They're a product of the american dream (CORRUPTION) AT ALL LEVELS. We have always had Black gangsters and phoney's. Now we have Ivy Leage sellouts and phoneys from harvard, columbia and princeston. I grew-up in and around the HOOD and being a gangster was for those who couldn't do anything else. My question is why have so many of US cover-up for the phoneys in the whitehouse??? Our great children will pay for this lie. The Black elite and civil rights so-called leaders have sold us OUT. Tavis and West could have done a better job of telling the truth.

[Thisis My Fullname]

As a listener since The Tavis Smiley show started on KUOW, I've always liked Tavis's use of the term ...maybe with help from the implicit assumption that there was some trace of implicit irony.  (...Tavis: Talk!!!  :<))

   My two cents, for what they're worth, are that I just happen to like 'Black' better than 'African American.'  (With acknowledgment of the historical legitimacy of 'Negro' ...which I remember thinking was the Real Deal for progressive rhetoric, to either side of Martin Luther King's funeral.  ...Watched on a little black and white tv when I was 6.  (We had tuna noodle casserole.  I know the floor plan of our house, at least between the tv room and the kitchen.  This was my JFK.)  

Here's thing.  No one term can hope to comprehend the complexity of the communal experience of the (mostly West and Central) African (as in, Big continent, Not fictional country) diaspora in this part of this hemisphere.  Never the Freaking Mind nuances of skin color.  

With that as context, I like 'Black' because it acknowledges the former part of the dialectic.  Brother / Dr. West, you could do That Much More with this than I can, but is it not true that Francophones noires (etymological alert, vis. 'Negro') did a lot, literarily and politically, toward linking colonial and recently post-colonia parts of Africa with their cousins in our hemispere?  Never mind that the term 'Black' had that much to do with some of the most pregressive social, cultural and political thinking by Blacks in our very owney Untied States of UhMair-uh-kuh.  (Where Black people have lived that much longer than, for one instance,   people of very miscellaneous Central European descent, some of whom seem hell bent on perpetuating the Old Time Religion of white racism, for one thing because they can get so little other traction with what being an American is ostensibly about.)

...'African American,' by contrast, dialectically genericizes, and dilutes, both terms.  It reminds me of, for instance, 'Irish American.'  Now, there are Irish-Americans who I love, and others who I wish I had occasion to.  But this, in turn, has to evoke a short story by Langston Hugues (read, like that stuff above, at an impressionable age).  A Black kid has a wise Irish-American teacher who patiently explains that her people had to overcome prejudice and socio-economic oppression.  ...Except, Wait a Minute, the Black Kid's people got here three centuries before Hers did.  To paraphrase 'The Sound of [expletive] Music:'

    Hullieu, Hullieu, ...to Yieu and Yieu and Yieu-uh....

...One last thing about color.  A while ago, I was talking with a cousin, more healthily yellow than I am, which didn't stop him from being frighteningly Republican.  Here's the fun part.  At one point in the convesation, I said something like, 'well, you know Obama isn't our first Black president.'

His eyes widened, to the extent that that a yellow Republican's could.

[Quoting myself --a bad habit:] 'No; he's our first Colored president.

Done now.  Peace out; God bless us, every one.  +

[Thisis My Fullname]

...Just that in this context, 'Black' is already a metaphor.

         Evil man make me kill ya;

         Evil man make you kill me.

         Evil man make me kill you,

         Even though we're only families apart.

              Hendrix, "Machine Gun" (Band of Gypsys, 1970)

[Ricardo Jones]

Following law school, Michelle worked as an associate in the Chicago branch of the law firm Sidley Austin in the area of marketing and intellectual property. There in 1989, she met her future husband, Barack Obama, a summer intern whom she was assigned as an adviser. "I went to Harvard and he went to Harvard, and the firm thought, 'Oh, we'll hook these two people up,'" Michelle said. "So, you know, there was a little intrigue, but I must say after about a month, Barack…asked me out, and I thought no way. This is completely tacky." Initially, she refused to date Obama, believing that their work relationship would make the romance improper. Eventually she relented, and the couple soon fell in love.

After two years of dating, Barack proposed. "We were at a restaurant having dinner to celebrate the fact that he had finished the bar," Michelle remembers. "Then the waiter came over with the dessert and a tray. And there was the ring. And I was completely shocked." The couple married at Trinity United Church of Christ on October 18, 1992.

High-Profile Work in Chicago
Michelle soon left her job to launch a career in public service, serving as an assistant to Mayor Daley and then as the assistant commissioner of planning and development for the City of Chicago.

In 1993, she became Executive Director for the Chicago office of Public Allies, a non-profit leadership-training program that helped young adults develop skills for future careers in the public sector.

Michelle joined the University of Chicago in 1996 as associate dean of student services, developing the University’s first community service program. She then worked for the University of Chicago Hospitals beginning in 2002, as executive director of community relations and external affairs.

In May 2005, she was appointed vice president of community relations and external affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she continues to work part-time. She also manages the business diversity program and sits on six boards, including the prestigious Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.