Nigton

By: Roy Douglas Malonson  The late-great comedian and activist Paul Mooney said, “the Black man in America is the most copied man on this planet, bar none. Everybody wants to be a nigger, but nobody wants to be a nigger.” He’s damn right. We Black people know this all too well. And even though the Black man is the “most copied” man in the world, he is also the “most disrespected,” and it starts with one damn word. The “politically correct” reference these days is to say “N-word,” but everyone knows they say it loud and proud as often as they can – NIGGER – a word White Supremacist racists derived from a word originally used to classify our race – NEGRO. Negro is not an ugly word, but because of the way that racists have turned it into a negative, Black folks have been moving away from it so much that we have gotten confused with who the hell we are. We were once Africans, then we were Negroes, then we were colored, then Black, then African Americans, and I think – since they claim our LIVES MATTER – we are now Black again. And what about the “negro?” Well, some people want to remove the word altogether, just to remove the negative “nigger” associated with it. Can you believe, there are still plenty of public places that bear the name, starting right here in the Lone Star State. The word “Negro” appears in dozens of places across Texas. Although the Texas Legislature passed a law three decades earlier that would rename the locations after prominent Black Americans, it was blocked by the U.S. Board for Geographic Names. The reasoning given was that there was a lack of support for renaming these places and lack of opposition for the current names. Many of the bill’s supporters were unaware that the legislation had no effect. Rodney Ellis, Harris County Commissioner and former state lawmaker that supported the bill in 1991, said that he did not know the name changes hadn’t been made until he was contacted by NPR last year. […]