by Rita Lady If you were black and around in the 70s, you'll remember Uncle Shabazz. Uncle Shabazz (aka Tommy) wore a fist pick in his afro and a dashiki. The one whose house was decorated in velvet wallpaper where incense smoke floated past the naked Zulu figurines. He would go on about black pride, Marcus Garvey, and the motherland. To acknowledge and embrace your African-ness was of the utmost importance to Uncle Shabazz. So, Uncle Shabazz would reject being called colored or negro, in exchange for African-American. The term African-American was thrown around in the 1960s during the new civil rights movement. Communist groups such as the Blank Panthers advocated Black Nationalism and thought it necessary to rethink what blacks were to be called. The term negro was still being used in news publications until the 1990s according to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, but was reminiscent of the times of Jim Crow. In 1988, Jesse Jackson called on several black leaders to start using the term African-American because it has I take issue with hyphenations such as African-American, Asian-American, Native-American, etc. Here are four reasons why: Despite the stories the media feeds us constantly about how everyone is racist and awful, I feel blessed to live in a country where ideas that I agree with and disagree with, can be freely expressed without fear of imprisonment or a firing squad...yet.
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