One of the more intersting aspects of the Harry Reid case is how oddly anachronistic he sounded with "Negro dialect." He has let time pass him by, apparently unaware that Negro has gone from favored word to taboo word. "Colored" gave way to "Negro," which became "black," which is now becoming (or has become) "African-American," with a brief flirtation with "Afro-American" along the way and a little bit of affection here and there for "people of color." And as each new term became preferred, the one it replaced gradually became stigmatized:
In each case, the transition from one term to another was driven by a belief that changing it would somehow reduce racism and increase the social status of black Americans. Unfortunately, I see no evidence that the various changes actually had any such beneficial effect. Indeed, each of these transitions might actually have increased white resentment towards blacks at the margin. As they happened, people who stuck to the old term out of habit would sometimes be accused of racism or racial insensitivity, and such accusations often generate a predictable backlash. Of course, it's possible that there is data showing that the shift from “Negro” to “black” or that from “black” to “African-American” really did reduce racial prejudice after all. If so, I would be very interested to see it.
My father was one of those who could not give up on "colored," the term he used till the day he died in 1984, not because he harbored prejudice (though he undoubtedly had some from the mere fact of growing up in white, rural Kentucky with no black interactions), but because he was stuck in the era when that was the polite term to use.
Any term that is applied to an entire group of people, even if the currently accepted one, no matter how noble the intent, is going to demean the individuals in that group, because the label itself is an exercise in trying to herd people into boxes to fit our preconceptions. So each new favored label is merely the ne
