NEW SERIES - *CONSIDERATE, DIPLOMATIC, GENDER-FREE, INCLUSIVE AND INOFFENSIVE* BEHAVIOUR* PART ONE - THE 'N' WORD.

I don't like the term 'political correctness' or 'PC'. It's pejorative and is used to demean people trying to show consideration to others.

First coined in 1917 as part of Marxist-Leninist vocabulary, political correctness has evolved into a term  used to describe language, policies, or measures that are intended to avoid offense or disadvantage to members of particular groups in society. When you say something is 'PC' today it's interpreted as a put-down.

There are many things in life that require consideration, diplomacy, gender-free judgement, inclusiveness and inoffensive behaviour - probably too many to list and discuss here given the short attention span of our readers so I thought that we (The Curmudgeons Inc.ⓒ) could run a series on an important few of them.

Part one will be a look at the 'N' word.

This was chosen, and indeed the series has been chosen following a reference in Robert's latest (since deleted) post to negroes. I, and I hope most of you had thought that the word or term 'negro' as it refers to black people was officially disused.

According to the Jim Crow Museum website the word Negro become socially unacceptable in the second half of last century.

"It started its decline in 1966 and was totally uncouth by the mid-1980s. The turning point came when Stokely Carmichael coined the phrase black power at a 1966 rally in Mississippi. Until then, Negro was how most black Americans described themselves. But in Carmichael's speeches and in his landmark 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, he persuasively argued that the term implied black inferiority. Among black activists, Negro soon became shorthand for a member of the establishment. Prominent black publications like Ebony switched from Negro to black at the end of the decade, and the masses soon followed. According to a 1968 Newsweek poll, more than two-thirds of black Americans still preferred Negro, but black had become the majority preference by 1974. Both the Associated Press and the New York Times abandoned Negro in the 1970s, and by the mid-1980s, even the most hidebound institutions, like the U.S. Supreme Court, had largely stopped using Negro.

Had Sen. Reid chosen to defend his word choice, he could have cited some formidable authorities. Colored was the preferred term for black Americans until W.E.B. Du Bois, following the lead of Booker T. Washington, advocated for a switch to Negro in the 1920s. (Du Bois also used black in his writings, but it wasn't his term of choice.) Despite claims that Negro was a white-coined word intended to marginalize black people, Du Bois argued that the term was "etymologically and phonetically" preferable to colored or "various hyphenated circumlocutions." Most importantly, the new terminology -- chosen by black leaders themselves-symbolized a rising tide of black intellectual, artistic, and political assertiveness. (After achieving the shift in vocabulary, Du Bois spearheaded a letter-writing campaign to capitalize his preferred term. In 1930 -- nine years before Harry Reid was born -- the New York Times Style Book made the change.) Black supplanted Negro when the energy of this movement waned.

In 1988, after the black power movement had itself faded, many leaders decided another semantic change was required. Jesse Jackson led the push toward African-American. But, so far, the change does not seem to have the same momentum that Negro and black once did. In recent polls, most black interviewees express no preference between black and African-American, and most publications don't recommend the use of one over the other.

It can be challenging for institutions and older people, who have seen racial terms come and go during their lifetimes, to adapt. The NAACP, founded in 1909, declined to change its name during the DuBois revolution but did stop using colored in all other contexts. Negro History Week, begun in 1926, changed to Black History Month in 1976. The United Negro College Fund is now trying to emphasize its initials rather than its full name. The last time the Supreme Court used the word Negro outside quotation marks or citations to other scholarship was in 1985. The writer was Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice, who came of age during the time of DuBois. Despite public outcry, the U.S. Census still includes the word Negro, because many older people still use it."

I'm not sure where Robert's been since 1966 and know that he was about eleven years old then so should have been aware of this if he hadn't had his head buried under a rock or in a Catechism or a bible. Like older right-wing American Republicans and white supremacy activists anywhere Robert holds on to this now discredited term. I guess that it's in keeping with lots of his out of date beliefs which we might discuss in future episodes on gender equality, misogyny, liberalism, democracy and religious freedom.

I wonder if he still owns a golliwog?