<p>I’ll tell a story here that I have related in other threads. I’m a baby boomer, which is another way of saying that I’m a good bit older than most people who post on College Confidential. I distinctly remember the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated–the most memorable day of early childhood for many people in my generation–and I remember the “long hot summer” and other events of the 1960s civil rights movement. </p>
<p>One early memory I have is of a second grade classmate (I still remember his name, which alas is just common enough that it is hard to Google him up) who moved back to Minnesota with his northern “white” parents after spending his early years in Alabama. He told me frightening stories about Ku Klux Klan violence to black people (the polite term in those days was “Negroes”), including killing babies, and I was very upset to hear about that kind of terrorism happening in the United States. He made me aware of a society in which people didn’t all treat one another with decency and human compassion, unlike the only kind of society I was initially aware of from growing up where I did. So I followed subsequent news about the civil rights movement, including the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr. up to his assassination, with great interest. </p>
<p>It happens that I had a fifth-grade teacher, a typically pale, tall, and blonde Norwegian-American, who was a civil rights activist and who spent her summers in the south as a freedom rider. She used to tell our class about how she had to modify her car (by removing the dome light and adding a locking gas cap) so that Klan snipers couldn’t shoot her as she opened her car door at night or put foreign substances into her gas tank. She has been a civil rights activist all her life, and when I Googled her a few years ago and regained acquaintance with her, I was not at all surprised to find that she is a member of the civil rights commission of the town where I grew up. </p>
<p>One day in fifth grade we had a guest speaker in our class, a young man who was then studying at St. Olaf College through the A Better Chance (ABC) affirmative action program. (To me, the term “affirmative action” still means active recruitment of underrepresented minority students, as it did in those days, and I have always thought that such programs are a very good idea, as some people have family connections to selective colleges, but many other people don’t.) During that school year (1968-1969), there was a current controversy in the United States about whether the term “Negro” or “Afro-American” or “black” was most polite. So a girl in my class asked our visitor, “What do you want to be called, ‘black’ or ‘Afro-American’?” His answer was, “I’d rather be called Henry.” Henry’s answer to my classmate’s innocent question really got me thinking. </p>
<p>Thus far my story from my childhood. I agree with what appears to be the premise of the study in the link from the thread-opening post, that many white people are uneasy about describing black people in that manner. For someone my age, that could be a result of the changes in polite vocabulary that have occurred in my lifetime. (And I rather suspect that in some countries in Europe, and definitely in most countries of east Asia, there has been no comparable linguistic change in our lifetime.) The other problem, of course, is that any term for the antebellum slave-descended black population in the United States seems to pick up “secondary meaning,” which is both a cause and an effect of persistent social prejudice. People who talk about “color-blind” ways of dealing with people, as Martin Luther King, Jr. did in his I Have a Dream speech and as my class visitor Henry did many years ago, were making an honest effort to try to avoid having individuals overclassified into one inclusive group. </p>
<p>I’m glad my children, who have always had black neighbors and thus never felt social isolation from black people, feel comfortable just matter-of-factly describing a person as black, as they would also describe other neighbors as white, Indian (here meaning “from India”), Asian (in my family, “Asian” is the default spoken term for what I write as “east Asian”), etc., with other descriptive terms (“tall,” “big,” “blond,” “with eyeglasses”) used with no more secondary meaning in their minds than those terms. We have a variety of neighbors and get along with all of them. Descriptions of people’s personal appearance shouldn’t be forced to carry a lot of other personal baggage unrelated to that issue. </p>
<p>I’ll tell one more story. I once was on a business trip with two officials from China, working as their interpreter. I checked into a hotel in another city, and the hotel staff heard me speaking Chinese to the Chinese officials. After I made sure they were settled in their rooms, one of the hotel staff members, a tall, slim, black man, said to me, “Was that Chinese?” He was evidently impressed that I, who looked white, could speak that language. He said, “I can speak Arabic and Italian,” and I immediately said, “Oh, you must be from _______.” </p>
<p>Do you know the country?</p>