Negro
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
"Morning, noon and night we were subjected to jeers, insults and blows because we were "Negroes". Who will ever forget that the black was addressed as "tu", not because he was a friend, but because the polite "vous" was reserved for the white man?" --Patrice Lumumba, "Congolese Independence Speech" from The Truth about a Monstrous Crime of the Colonialists, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961, pp. 44-47. [1] |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Negro is a racial term applied to black people. However, prior to the shift in the "lexicon" of American and worldwide classification of race and ethnicity in the late 1960s, the appellation was accepted as a normal formal term both by those of African descent as well as non-blacks. Negro means black in Spanish and Portuguese, and the Italian nero is similar (Latin: niger = "black").
Near-synonyms in common use include
- "black"
- "dark-skinned"
- "coloured" (though in South Africa this means "of mixed race")
- "African" (or, in the United States, "African-American").
However, these terms are not clearly racial — the first three can refer to other non-white groups, while the last one, being a geographic reference, could be interpreted to refer to North Africans as well.
See also
- Negermusik
- How I Became a Negro
- The White Negro
- Etude de nègre (1838) by Théodore Chassériau
- "De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so far as Ah can see" (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston
