The census: Is anyone still a ‘Negro’?

Is it 2010 or 1910? said Jonathan Pitts-Wiley in TheRoot.com. Black folk have to be wondering, after hearing the news that on the race section of this year’s official census form, one of the boxes for Americans to check is labeled “Black, African-Am., or Negro.” The term Negro, I thought, was a relic of the Jim Crow era that no one, with the exception of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, uses anymore—least of all the government. The Census Bureau has now explained that it was attempting to be “inclusive,” as many older African-Americans apparently still think of themselves as Negroes. That may be true, but would the omission of this “negatively loaded” term really cause anyone to check the wrong box? I don’t think so.

“Negroes, please,” said Darryl Owens in the Orlando Sentinel. I understand “the heartburn some feel for a word that is outdated as lunch-counter protests,” but let’s not have a “collective coronary about its inclusion on the census form.” The question of what to call black Americans has vexed well-meaning linguists for generations, and “Negro” has appeared on the census form since 1950. The Census Bureau is now reviewing whether the word should be dropped for the 2020 census, but in the meantime we black Americans can reflect on the “unabashed progress we’ve made.” Whatever you think of the wording of that particular box, remember that this year, the president of the U.S. will be checking it off.

I, for one, will be checking the Negro box with relish, said Ta-Nehisi Coates in TheAtlantic.com. For years I’ve been labeled a “black writer,” with all the degrading connotations of pretentious turtlenecks, spoken-word events, and boring conferences attended solely by professors of African-American history. Now, thanks to the census, I can finally be a “Negro writer” in the mold of Langston Hughes or W.E.B. Du Bois. “I’m talking about tweed and sepia, sonnets which trade in words like ‘inglorious’ and phrases like ‘O kinsmen.’” Maybe I’ll even get a bow tie! There’s something “undeniably epic” about the term Negro, said Stanley Crouch in the New York Daily News. I can’t hear it without recalling “the magnificent people who used that word to describe themselves” while they were fighting for their, and our, civil rights. They took the word and “gave it majesty; they made it luminous,” and nothing could be less derogatory.

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