Negro
In the English language, the term negro is a term historically used to refer to people of Black African heritage. The term negro means the color black in Spanish and Portuguese, where English took it from. The term can be viewed as offensive, inoffensive, or completely neutral, largely depending on the region or country where it is used, as well as the time period and context in which it is applied. It has various equivalents in other languages of Europe.
In English
Around 1442, the Portuguese first arrived in Southern Africa while trying to find a sea route to India. The term negro, literally meaning 'black', was used by the Spanish and Portuguese as a simple description to refer to the Bantu peoples that they encountered. Negro denotes 'black' in Spanish and Portuguese, derived from the Latin word niger, meaning 'black', which itself is probably from a Proto-Indo-European root *nekw-, "to be dark", akin to *nokw-, 'night'. Negro was also used for the peoples of West Africa in old maps labelled Negroland, an area stretching along the Niger River.From the 18th century to the late 1960s, negro was considered to be the proper English-language term for people of black African origin. According to Oxford Dictionaries, use of the word "now seems out of date or even offensive in both British and US English".
A specifically female form of the word, negress, was occasionally used. However, like Jewess, it has completely fallen out of use.
Negroid was used within physical anthropology to denote one of the three purported races of humankind, alongside Caucasoid and Mongoloid. The suffix "-oid" means "similar to". Negroid as a noun was used to designate a wider or more generalized category than Negro; as an adjective, it qualified a noun as in, for example, "negroid features".
United States
Negro superseded colored as the most polite word for African Americans at a time when black was considered more offensive. In 17th-century colonial America, the term Negro had been also, according to one historian, used to describe Native Americans. John Belton O'Neall's The Negro Law of South Carolina stipulated that "the term negro is confined to slave Africans, and their descendants. It does not embrace the free inhabitants of Africa, such as the Egyptians, Moors, or the negro Asiatics, such as the Lascars." The American Negro Academy was founded in 1897, to support liberal arts education. Marcus Garvey used the word in the names of black nationalist and pan-Africanist organizations such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Negro World, the Negro Factories Corporation, and the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World. W. E. B. Du Bois and Dr. Carter G. Woodson used it in the titles of their non-fiction books, The Negro and The Mis-Education of the Negro respectively. Du Bois also used in the titles of his books The Study of the Negro Problems and The Philadelphia Negro. Negro was accepted as normal, both as exonym and endonym, until the late 1960s, after the later Civil Rights Movement. One example is Martin Luther King Jr. self-identification as Negro in his famous "I Have a Dream" speech of 1963.File:All-Negro_Comics_1.jpg|thumb|Prevalence of negro as a demonym has varied in American English. All-Negro Comics was a 1947 comic anthology written by African-American writers and featuring black characters.
However, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the word Negro began to be criticized as having been imposed by white people, and having connotations of racial subservience and Uncle Tomism. The term Black, in contrast, denoted pride, power, and a rejection of the past. It took root first in more militant groups such as the Black Muslims and Black Panthers, and by 1967, SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael pushed for the abandonment of Negro. After the Newark riots in the summer of 1967, one third to one half of young Black males polled in Newark self-identified as Black. The term coexisted for a while with Negro, with the newer term initially referring only to progressive or radical Blacks, while Negro was used more for the Black establishment. Malcolm X preferred Black to Negro, but also started using the term Afro-American after leaving the Nation of Islam.
Since the late 1960s, various other terms have been more widespread in popular usage. These include Black, Black African, Afro-American and African American. The word Negro fell out of favor by the early 1970s and major media including Associated Press and The New York Times stopped using it that decade. 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 baseball in the early and mid-20th century, and organizations such as the United Negro College Fund. 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 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.
African-American linguist John McWhorter has bemoaned attacks on the use of Negro in "utterances or written reproductions of the word when referring to older texts and titles". He cites reports that performances or publishing of certain works have been avoided, "out of wariness of the word 'Negro'” used in titles; and of "two cases" between 2020-2021 "of white college professors having complaints filed against them by students for using the word 'Negro' in class when quoting older texts."
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. The U.S. census used the grouping "Black, African-American, or Negro". Negro was used in an effort to include older African Americans who more closely associate with the term. In 2013, the census removed the term from its forms and questionnaires. The term has also been censored by some newspaper archives.
Liberia
The constitution of Liberia limits Liberian nationality to Negro people. People of other racial origins, even if they have lived for many years in Liberia, are thus precluded from becoming citizens of the Republic.In other languages
Spanish language
In Spanish, negro is most commonly used for the color black, but it can also be used to describe people with dark-colored skin. In Spain, Mexico, and almost all of Latin America, negro means just 'black colour' and does not refer by itself to any ethnic or race unless further context is provided. As in English, this Spanish word is often used figuratively and negatively, to mean 'irregular' or 'undesirable', as in mercado negro. However, in most Spanish-speaking countries, negro and negra are commonly as a form of endearment, when used to refer to partners or close friends.Spanish East Indies
In the Philippines, which historically had almost no contact with the Atlantic slave trade, the Spanish-derived term negro is still commonly used to refer to black people, as well as to people with dark-colored skin. As in Spanish usage, it has no negative connotations when referring to black people. However, it can be mildly pejorative when referring to the skin color of other native Filipinos due to traditional beauty standards. The use of the term for the color black is restricted to Spanish phrases or nouns.Negrito is also a term used in the Philippines to refer to the various darker-skinned native ethnic groups that partially descended from early Australo-Melanesian migrations. These groups include the Aeta, Ati, Mamanwa, and the Batak, among others. Despite physical appearances, they all speak Austronesian languages and are genetically related to other Austronesian Filipinos. The island of Negros is named after them. The term Negrito has entered scientific usage in the English language based on the original Spanish/Filipino usage to refer to similar populations in South and Southeast Asia. However, the appropriateness of using the word to bundle people of similar physical appearances has been questioned as genetic evidence show they do not have close shared ancestry.
Other Romance languages
Italian
In Italian, negro was the archaic form of the adjective nero; as such, the previous form can still be found in literary texts or in surnames, while the latter form is the only one currently used today. However, the word could also be used as a noun and at a certain point it was commonly used as term equivalent to English negro, but without its offensive connotation. However, under influence from English-speaking cultures, by the 1970s it had been replaced with nero and di colore. Nero was considered a better translation of the English word black, while di colore is a loan translation of the English word colored.The noun is considered offensive today, but some attestations of the previous use can still be found.
In Italian law, Act No. 654 of 13 October 1975, as amended by Act No. 205 of 25 June 1993 and Act No. 85 of 24 February 2006, criminalizes incitement to and racial discrimination itself, incitement to and racial violence itself, the promotion of ideas based on racial superiority or ethnic or racist hatred and the setting up or running of, participation in or support to any organisation, association, movement or group whose purpose is the instigation of racial discrimination or violence. As the Council of Europe noted in its 2016 report, "the wording of the Reale Act does not include language as ground of discrimination, nor is color included as a ground of discrimination." However, the Supreme Court, in affirming a lower-court decision, declared that the use of the term negro by itself, if it has a clearly offensive intention, may be punishable by law, and is considered an aggravating factor in a criminal prosecution.