As did I. Yeah, the one with the female version of the N-word.
No, Negress is the female version of Negro. That N-word stuff, that's the bigotry in your head. Let's see what Wikipedia says about "Negro":
Negro superseded
colored as the most polite word for
African Americans at a time when
black was considered more offensive.
[5] In Colonial America during the 1600s the term Negro was, according to one historian, also used to describe
Native Americans[6] Marcus Garvey used the word in the names of
black nationalist and
pan-Africanist organizations such as the
Universal Negro Improvement Association (founded 1914), the
Negro World (1918), the
Negro Factories Corporation (1919), and the
Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World (1920).
W. E. B. Du Bois and Dr.
Carter G. Woodson used it in the titles of their non-fiction books,
The Negro (1915) and
The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933) respectively. "Negro" was accepted as normal, both as
exonym and endonym, until the late 1960s, after the later
African-American Civil Rights Movement. One well-known example is the identification by
Martin Luther King, Jr. of his own race as "Negro" in his famous "
I Have a Dream" speech of 1963.
However, during the 1950s and 1960s, some black American leaders, notably
Malcolm X, objected to the word
Negro because they associated it with the long history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination that treated African Americans as
second class citizens, or worse.
[7] Malcolm X preferred
Black to
Negro, but also started using the term
Afro-American after leaving the
Nation of Islam.
[8]
Since the late 1960s, various other terms have been more widespread in popular usage. These include
black,
Black African,
Afro-American (in use from the late 1960s to 1990) and
African American.
[9] The word
Negro fell out of favor by the early 1970s. However, many older African Americans initially found the term
black more offensive than
Negro.
The term
Negro is still used in some historical contexts, such as the songs known as
Negro spirituals, the
Negro Leagues of sports in the early and mid-20th century, and organizations such as the
United Negro College Fund.
[10][11] The
academic journal published by
Howard University since 1932 still bears the title
Journal of Negro Education, but others have changed: e.g. the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (founded 1915) became the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History in 1973, and is now the
Association for the Study of African American Life and History; its publication
The Journal of Negro History became
The Journal of African American History in 2001.
Margo Jefferson titled her 2015 book
Negroland: A Memoir to evoke growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in the
African-American upper class.
The
United States Census Bureau included
Negro on the
2010 Census, alongside
Black and
African-American, because some older black Americans still self-identify with the term.
[12][13][14] The
U.S. Census now uses the grouping "Black, African-American, or Negro."
Negro is used in efforts to include older African Americans who more closely associate with the term.
[15]
