A Land Where There Are Still Negroes

I confess to not knowin much about Brad Pitt. Somehow, despite the hype surrounding Brangelina, I manage not to care much about the first half of that particular portmanteau. If someone put a gun to my head and asked me to name a movie Brad Pitt had been in, I would probably die.

When it comes to Angelina Jolie, however, I can at least recall her riveting performance in Girl, Interrupted, which I recall seeing with my friend Avi Mowshowitz on one or another of our double feature nights. A great many things about that movie have stuck in my mind, but I remember in particular a scene in which the Winona Ryder tells the African-American nurse that she "ain't no doctor" and asks what she learned at "night school for Negroes."

Ah...Negroes. A word we don't use any more in America. Even old people in the South, from what I understand, don't really use it any more. As a confirmed Yankee, I can imagine that a few diehard Sons of Confederate Veterans types have romantic associations with the word. And of course, it crops up occasionally when the United Negro College Fund reminds us that a mind is a terrible thing to waste. But it's a word most non-black people don't dare use.

I was surprised, then, to hear it roll off the tongue of one of my adult students, Charles, when I went to see him this afternoon. Charles called me last night as I was doing laundry, to find out where my situation with Eve and Ruby currently stands. I told him I had resigned and would have my last day today. I didn't have a lot of time to talk, but told him I would be glad to get together with him and discuss all of it further. And so this afternoon, after taking leave of Ruby and Eve for the last time, I went up to his apartment to chat.

Somehow, after Ruby and Eve, we got around to topics related to America, and he said something--I forget what, nothing particularly disparaging or controversial--about Martin Luther King. And the word Negro came off his tongue.

I explained quickly that this was no longer the preferred term for people of African descent in America and wrote down black and African-American for him. He was rather surprised to learn of this--he says I am the first person to have said something about this. But then, his opportunities to talk with "real Americans" are not many, and I suppose the complexities of American political correctness are as foreign to him as the issue of Taiwanese independence is to me.

My guess is that Charles probably first started learning English at a time when Negro was still an acceptable, or even the preferred, term, and simply never got into a situation where he had to unlearn this early training. I doubt his use of the word is in any way grounded in racism.

I have noticed, though, a certain amount of curiosity about black people among the few Taiwanese I have heard say anything on the subject. One of my now-former students, a 10-year-old girl in one of the higher-level children's classes, remarked on images of black people in a book about New York I brought in as a reader. White people are a rarity in Taiwan; African-American or other black people, I suppose, are even more of a rarity. Some interest is no doubt a reflection of rap music's popularity in Taiwan, which I gather to be about as high as in the West.