Coloured people

BBC radio news recently reported that the chairman of the Football Association had resigned after using a ‘racial slur’. The offending word in question was ‘coloured’ when referring to footballers.

Something similar occurred when the headmistress of Roedean School, explaining to pupils the origins of Black History Month in 1926, mentioned that it was originally called ‘Negro History Week’. This prompted several pupils to complain demanding that she apologise for using the ‘racist’ word ‘negro’. Predictably, she surrendered to their intimidation by issuing a grovelling apology admitting that ‘the original name contains an offensive word and by using this word in this context I was attempting to show how far language around black people has come since then. However, in hindsight I recognise it was not necessary to use the specific word and I accept that by using this word at all I have caused offence to some pupils.’ Fortunately, the headmistress has been allowed to keep her job as many parents supported her.

The irony about this kind of furore is that until the early 1970s both ‘coloured’ and ‘negro’ were considered to be courteous and neutral words to describe dark skinned people. For example, Martin Luther King Jr, in his acclaimed ‘I have a dream’ speech in 1963 repeatedly used the word ‘negro, when he declared ‘the Negro still is not free…the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination… the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity…the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.’

With regard to the use of the word ‘coloured’, in both Britain and the USA, this term was ubiquitous in newspapers, magazines, TV and radio programmes during the 1950s and 1960s, and the word ‘black’ was deliberately avoided. ‘Coloured’ was universally regarded as a courteous and polite description, whereas the use of ‘black’ was deemed offensive. I can still remember when on our first shopping trip to Hull, from our small all white town in our new car, my younger brother excitedly exclaimed ‘look, there is a black man over there’. Somewhat shocked my mother reprimanded him ‘you should never call them black, but instead refer to them as coloured which is polite’. The word ‘coloured’ was used not just to describe Afro-Caribbean people but also Asians. It should be remembered that the full title of the American campaigning organisation NAACP still remains as the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.

In the early 1970s the more vocal African Americans came to the conclusion that describing themselves as black was nothing to be ashamed of, or something which they needed to be on the defensive about. As a consequence the term ‘black’ very quickly supplanted ‘coloured’ as the approved form of address. This first came to my own consciousness with the hit song Young Gifted & Black from 1970. For many people, being able to say black in this context caused a frisson of pleasure in using a word that until only recently had been considered taboo.

In more recent years the term ‘people of colour’ has come to be regarded as the most appropriate term to use. So we have arrived at the absurd situation that to speak of ‘coloured people’ is considered to be grossly offensive whereas ‘people of colour’ is deemed the pinnacle of political correctness, when in grammatical terms their factual meaning is identical. This all bodes very ill for harmonious race relations, since it gives the white majority the impression that dark skinned people are so hypersensitive that they must always be shielded and protected if their wellbeing is to be preserved. They are in effect being infantilised in pursuit of an over protective political agenda, and white people are being demonised whenever they transgress the current ludicrous virtue signalling speech codes. In a sane society the words black, Negro, coloured people and people of colour should all be interchangeable and regarded as neutral forms of expression.

Now what was it that Enoch Powell said about the black man having the whip hand over the white man?