somin to read... from:
The color of Words: An Encylcopaedic Dictionary of Ethnic Bias in the United States... by Philip H. Herbst
these are jus wat i thought were some of the important/ interesting parts:
From a word in Old English, black, according to The Oxford English Dict.(89), has long referred to things deadly, milignant, foul or soiled, wicked, disastrous, or existing outside of grace.
( and from a modern dictionary:Cheerless and depressing/Evil; wicked/Soiled, as from soot; dirty/Of or belonging to a racial group having brown to black skin, especially one of African origin: the Black population of South Africa/Of or belonging to an American ethnic group descended from African peoples having dark skin; African-American-
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=black )
Even the light-skinned people semed so dark to the English that they tended to call these people too, by the monolithic term blk (simularly, they came to apply it to Native Americans in the British colonies). It was "an exaggerated term which in itself suggests that the Negro's complexion had powerful impact on their perception".
Blk was often regarded as a slave term for AA,who avoided it after the civil war. blk americans had preferred African, free person orf color (by the 1840's, free blk people took pride in the initials f.m.c and f.w.c, "free man of color" and "free woamn of color," used after their signitures), Afro- American (first recorded 1853), and colored.
In the late 1960's the noun and adj blk was converted by blk people, expecially younger ones from an epithet used by yts to an ingroup preference. As a word that conotes "sinister", "evil", or "angry", blk was appropriate for a miitant stragety that sought to make blk people feared ( as oposed to controlled, persecuted, or patronized) and to present "blkness" as deliberatly in oppostion to "ytness"
Although some blks protest the strong racial sense term, blk is likely to persist for its simplicity and its symmetry with white.
Blk is also currently used by the fed govt in gathering census data. "Being blk speaks directly to my heart, while being AA speaks to my mind" More than an identification of a group, blk is a way of life that see itself in oppostion to the yt socitey. ( relates to my questioning of a blk experience)
when blk is capitalized....it may bring the blk culture in parallel with other ethnic or national groups whose names are also capitalized and suggest importance of the term as a socail and cultural indentity.
The US cultural, legal, and Census Bureau def of blk has been "any person with known blk ancestry"( aka as the
ne drop rule)
that book was published in 1997. and its written by a yt man- if that matters to anyone. im not sayin belive what u read- cuz blk is a beautiful thing to me- jus like others have expressed in this thread- but i jus wanted 2 put this info out there to read.