Off the Treadmill

"African-American" never completely caught on. That's a sign of progress.

By JAMES TARANTO

"The labels used to describe Americans of African descent mark the movement of a people from the slave house to the White House," writes Jesse Washington, the Associated Press's race-and-ethnicity correspondent. "Today, many are resisting this progression by holding on to a name from the past: 'black.' "
"I prefer to be called black," Houston accountant Shawn Smith. "How I really feel is, I'm American." He sees his heritage in Mississippi and North Carolina, where his parents grew up, not Africa.
"Gibré George, an entrepreneur from Miami, started a Facebook page called 'Don't Call Me African-American' on a whim." Washington reports."It now has about 300 'likes.' " As we write, that count has approximately quintupled.

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James Taranto on "African-American."

Objections to "African-American" aren't only a matter of taste. Sometimes the term actually doesn't fit. Joan Morgan, a Jamaican-born author, tells Washington that her relatives "were appalled and hurt" when she was introduced at a book signing as African-American: "That act of calling me African-American completely erased their history and the sacrifice and contributions it took to make me an author." (She calls herself a Black-Caribbean American, with a capital B.) And remember the hilarious 2005 incident in which CNN's Carol Lin referred to the deaths of "two African-American teenagers" who had been chased by police? It happened in Paris, and the teens were French citizens of Tunisian origin.
At any rate, it seems to us that it is a sign of real progress that so many blacks are "resisting" the "progression" from "black" to "African-American." Although the latter has come into common use since 1988, the former is still in wide use and it is not considered objectionable. That is not the case with earlier terms, of which Washington provides a brief history:

In 1619, the first African captives in America were described as "negars," which became the epithet still used by some today.

The Spanish word "negro" means black. That was the label applied by white Americans for centuries.

The word black also was given many pejorative connotations--a black mood, a blackened reputation, a black heart. "Colored" seemed better, until the civil rights movement insisted on Negro, with a capital N.

Then, in the 1960s, "black" came back--as an expression of pride, a strategy to defy oppression. . . .

Afro-American was briefly in vogue in the 1970s, and lingers today in the names of some newspapers and university departments. But it was soon overshadowed by African-American, which first sprouted among the black intelligentsia.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson is widely credited with taking African-American mainstream in 1988, before his second presidential run.

Amateur linguists will recognize the phenomenon known as the "euphemism treadmill," in which new words are invented to avoid the negative connotations that the old ones have taken on. Terms like colored and Negro were not originally slurs, as evidenced by their presence in the names of organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the United Negro College Fund. But they took on associations with the eras in which they had originally been embraced, times before American society formally recognized the full equality of the people to whom they referred.
"Black" is different in that it came into vogue just after the culmination of the civil rights movement. At the time, it connoted a defiant pride. "African-American," if anything, was an attempt to deny what was distinctive about the black experience in America: that, for the most part, it did not originate in an experience of voluntary immigration, in contrast with that of other hyphenated Americans.
Of course, there are exceptions to this, and President Obama is one of them. As his father was from Africa, he is an African-American in every sense of the term. (Obama Sr. was not, since he never naturalized.) In addition, as Washington notes, "there are some white Americans who were born in Africa." One of them, a native of Mozambique, would have become first lady in 2005 if a stadium full of Ohio State football fans had voted the other way.
Some of Washington's sources like the term "African-American," including columnist Clarence Page, who "uses it interchangeably with black." The AP scribe cites a January 2011 Wall Street Journal/NBC poll that found "42 percent of respondents said they preferred black, 35 percent said African-American, 13 percent said it doesn't make any difference, and 7 percent chose 'some other term.' "

Associated Press

Jesse Jackson in 1988

But what is most telling is that he cites no one who objects to "black"--including Jackson, who defends "African-American" as a statement of historical pride. "Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical, cultural base," Washington quotes Jackson as saying in 1988. "African-Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity."
Today, Jackson seems defensive at the news that many blacks reject the term he helped popularize. "It shows a willful ignorance of our roots, our heritage and our lineage," he tells Washington. "A fruit without a root is dying."
It seems to us, though, that it is very encouraging that the most broadly accepted term, "black," is the one that dates from just after the civil rights revolution. The legislative victories of that era could not make up for the atrocity of slavery or the injustice of Jim Crow. But by establishing that blacks would be equal citizens going forward, they obviated the need for the euphemism treadmill.
'Out of Touch'--With Whom?
Last week this column took a somewhat contrarian position in defending Mitt Romney's out-of-context statement that "I'm not concerned about the very poor." Without realizing it, Charles Blow, a liberal-left New York Times columnist (but we repeat), agrees with us:

Perhaps the most pernicious part of his statement was the underestimating of the rich and poor and the elasticized expansion of the term "middle income" or middle class. Romney suggests that 95 percent of Americans are in this group. Not true.

According to the Census Bureau, the official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent. . . .

At the very least, nearly a fourth of all Americans are either poor or rich.

That would leave about three-fourths somewhere in the middle, but not all middle class. Tricking the poor to believe they're in it, and allowing the wealthy to hide in it, is one of the great modern political deceptions and how we've arrived at our current predicament.

According to a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last month, nearly a fifth of families making less than $15,000 said that they were middle class and nearly two-fifths of those making more than $100,000 said that they were middle class.

Romney is not only cold and clumsy, he's disastrously out of touch, and when talking about real people, out of sorts. If only he had a heart, and if only that heart was connected to his brain.

Our argument, as you'll recall, was that Romney's statement, even taken out of context as it inevitably would be, was in tune with the attitudes of the vast majority of Americans, who think of themselves as "middle class." Blow agrees with this. His criticism of Romney, who is often caricatured as a cold technocrat, is that "he's disastrously out of touch" with census data.
Your Tax Dollars at Work
"In an extremely unusual use of taxpayer money, the leaders behind California's $99 billion high-speed train quietly hired a lobbyist to sway the Legislature--the same politicians who appointed them to build the project in the first place," reports the San Jose Mercury News:

Documents filed this week show the California High-Speed Rail Authority last year paid $161,103 to one of the country's biggest public relations firms to lobby the state's politicians as they consider spending $2.7 billion to launch the polarizing bullet train project.

Rail officials paid the lobbyists by issuing debt that will total about $300,000 with interest. It must be paid back through California's impoverished general fund budget.

The paper notes that "experts, lawmakers and legislative staffers could not remember a major state agency tapping state funds to lobby other members of the state government." But if it succeeds, what a bargain: They spend $300,000 to get $2.7 billion, a return of 899,900%. If they manage to pull it off, the federal government should look into this as a way of solving the entitlement crisis.
You Can't Fight Here, This Is the War Room!
"Statements posted on the Occupy Oakland website before Saturday's march urged those opposed to violence or vandalism to either steer clear or avoid interfering with those willing to engage in mayhem. 'If you identify as peaceful and are likely to interfere with the actions of your fellow protesters in any way (including telling them to stop performing a particular action, grappling, assaulting or holding them for arrest), you may not want to attend this march,' one statement read. 'It is a militant action. It attracts anti-capitalists, anti-fascists and other comrades of a revolutionary bent. It is not a march intended for people who are not fully comfortable with diversity of tactics.' "--San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 5