Colored People: A Memoir - Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on African-American History (1994)

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• published: 08 Feb 2014
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Colored is a term used in the United States to refer to black people (i.e., persons of sub-Saharan African ancestry; members of the black race). Since the success of the African-American Civil rights movement, the term, along with "negro" and others, has been largely replaced by "black." According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word colored was first used in the 14th Century. In other English-speaking countries, the term has varied meanings. In South Africa, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, the term Coloured refers both to a specific ethnic group of complex mixed origins, which is considered neither black nor white, and in other contexts to people of mixed race; in neither context is its usage considered derogatory. In British usage, the term refers to "a person who is wholly or partly of non-white descent" and its use may be regarded as antiquated or offensive, and other terms are preferable, particularly when referring to a single ethnicity. The term should not be confused with the term people of color, which generally refers to all non-white people. The term colored appeared in North America during the colonial era. In 1851 an article in the New York Times referred to the "colored population". In 1863, the War Department established the Bureau of Colored Troops. The first 12 Census counts in the U.S. enumerated '"colored" people, who totaled nine million in 1900. The Census counts of 1910--1960 enumerated "negroes." "It's no disgrace to be colored," the black entertainer Bert Williams famously observed early in the century, "but it is awfully inconvenient." "Colored people lived in three neighborhoods that were clearly demarcated, as if by ropes or turnstiles," writes Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. about growing up in segregated West Virginia in the 1960s. "Welcome to the Colored Zone, a large stretched banner could have said... Of course, the colored world was not so much a neighborhood as a condition of existence." "For most of my childhood, we couldn't eat in restaurants or sleep in hotels, we couldn't use certain bathrooms or try on clothes in stores," recalls Gates. His mother retaliated by not buying clothes she was not allowed to try on. He remembered hearing a white man deliberately calling his father by the wrong name. "'He knows my name, boy,' my father said after a long pause. 'He calls all colored people George.'" When Gates' female cousin became the first black cheerleader at the local high school, she was not allowed to sit with the team in a Naugahyde booth and drink Coke from a glass, but had to stand at the counter drinking from a paper cup. Professor Gates also wrote about his experiences in his 1995 book, Colored People: A Memoir. In the 21st century, colored is generally not regarded as a politically correct term. It lives on in the association name National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, generally called just NAACP, without actually enunciating the word for which each letter stands. In 2008 Carla Sims, communications director for the NAACP in Washington DC, said "the term 'colored' is not derogatory, [the NAACP] chose the word 'colored' because it was the most positive description commonly used [in 1909, when the association was founded]. It's outdated and antiquated but not offensive." To date, there has not been a movement to change the name of the organization to a more politically correct term such as the "National Association for the Advancement of African-Americans." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr., (born September 16, 1950) is an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, and editor. He was the first African American to receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. He has received numerous honorary degrees and awards for his teaching, research, and development of academic institutions to study black culture. In 2002, Gates was selected to give the Jefferson Lecture, in recognition of his "distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities." Gates has hosted several PBS television miniseries, including the history and travel program Wonders of the African World and the biographical African American Lives and Faces of America. Gates sits on the boards of many notable arts, cultural, and research institutions. He serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, where he is director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Gates hosted Faces of America, a four-part series presented by PBS in 2010. This program examined the genealogy of 12 North Americans of diverse ancestry: Elizabeth Alexander, Mario Batali, Stephen Colbert, Louise Erdrich, Malcolm Gladwell, Eva Longoria, Yo-Yo Ma, Mike Nichols, Queen Noor, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Meryl Streep, and Kristi Yamaguchi. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates Image By Jon Irons [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons