Black Stories
People of African descent have been present in North America since the 1500s. The legal codification of a color-based system of hereditary slavery took place at the end of the 18th and start of the 19th centuries. This legal codification helped to create the idea of races based on skin color and heritage and laid the groundwork for a color line in U.S. history. People descended from enslaved Africans have been referred to by others using pejorative terminology such as “colored” or as “darkies.” They have also embraced terminology to refer to themselves such as “Negro” or “African American.” “Black” has been among those terms commonly used to refer to the socially-constructed racial category that includes those descended from enslaved Africans, as well as those descended from more recent African and Caribbean immigrants, for more than a century. Black history and culture has emerged as a distinct thread in the American tapestry. “African American” or “Afro-American” emerged as an “ethnicity-based” term to refer to this racial category in the 1980s and became the preferred term for institutional use and for use among many individuals identifying with African American cultural heritage throughout the 1990s and 2000s. However, following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery in 2020, the term “Black” re-gained preference among institutions and media outlets. “Black” acknowledges the social construction of race and the preference by many Black people not to hyphenate their American identity. Although some authors have argued for the capitalization of the term White in order to emphasize its social construction and de-center it as a default racial identity, the MHHE has chosen not to adopt this practice so as not to pay respect to those who espouse a white supremacist ideology and personally prefer the capitalization of “White.”
For more background on this topic, please check out the following resources:
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “The Case for Capitalizing the ‘B’ in Black.” The Atlantic, June 18, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/time-to-capitalize-blackand-white/613159/.
AP NEWS. “Explaining AP Style on Black and White.” Accessed May 5, 2022. https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-9105661462.
Martin, Ben L. “From Negro to Black to African American: The Power of Names and Naming.” Political Science Quarterly 106, no. 1 (1991): 83–107. https://doi.org/10.2307/2152175.
Smith, Jamil, and Jamil Smith. “The Power of Black Lives Matter.” Rolling Stone (blog), June 16, 2020. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/black-lives-matter-jamil-smith-1014442/.