By Lee A. Daniels

As someone who was born a Negro – that’s what it says on my birth certificate — I wonder how anyone who has any understanding of black Americans’ history could think that the term “Negro,” or any of the other historical names black Americans have called themselves during their four-century sojourn in America, are demeaning or dishonorable.

All of those names – Aframerican, Coloured-American, Colored Person, Negro American, Afro-American, and so on – are honorable because they were chosen by black Americans at a particular historical moment for the sake of honor and strength. Even a cursory understanding of black Americans’ history makes this clear.

Black Americans who called themselves Negroes and Negro Americans fought the white political and military establishment to fight in the armed services in all of America’s wars.

At the turn of the twentieth century, they refused to let America’s attempt to construct an apartheid state – via the Supreme Court’s Plessy decision — go unchallenged and subsequently prodded the nascent National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to vigorously attack Jim Crow in the South.

They pressed for the integration of Major League Baseball, and made the first forays into corporate America and the virtually lily-white colleges of the North and the West.

They braved the racist mobs at Greensboro and Little Rock and Birmingham and New Orleans and Selma and hundreds of other places.

The list of actions that black Americans who called themselves Negroes and Negro Americans did to transform America into a democracy in fact not just rhetorically is voluminous and inspiring.

Who will say that because these people called themselves Negroes, they are less worthy in our eyes today, or that the term is not a term of honor?

I understand that the fervor with which some denounce the inclusion of the term “Negro” on the 2010 Census questionnaire confirms again what has always been true: that black Americans are extremely sensitive to the naming of what they (and others) call themselves in the current historical moment.

This extreme sensitivity is not a sign of weakness, as some say. Nor is it inconsequential. On the contrary, in group terms it is a sign of strength. It reflects black Americans’ determination to fight for their very right to exist. Blacks know from their own long experience that you must control the names by which you as an individual or your people are called if you are to have any control over your right to exist.

From 1619 onward black Americans had to continually try to protect the definition of who they were – human beings — from the racist invasions of European and white American theology, science, politics, psychology and the arts.

Most Africans and African Americans were imprisoned in the gulag of Slavery to build the foundation of the nation; but they were denied the fruits of the prosperity they produced for the whole of America because they were “named” as lazy and shiftless. They fought to make America free; but those they helped free continued to enslave them – “naming” them as unable and unfit to take care of themselves or contribute to the larger society. Their oppressors boasted of America as the land of liberty and opportunity, but simultaneously constructed an apartheid state and “named” them as its inhabitants.

This bizarre environment led black Americans to develop and hone to an exquisite sensitivity that most valuable psychological tool – double-consciousness — long before it was named in the early 1900s by the brilliant scholar-activist, W.E.B. Du Bois.

Black Americans’ changing their self-designation at particular historical moments represents what blacks’ use of double-consciousness became as the twentieth century deepened. At first it had been a frank tool for self-diagnosis and questioning of their own capabilities (was the racist ideology right?). But soon blacks re-fashioned that “second sight” from a psychological burden into a compass and gyroscope to help steady themselves and plot their course on the seventy-year trek from the devastating Plessy decision to the civil rights victories of the mid-1960s.

It is instructive, of course, that for all those seventy years black Americans fought fiercely to demand that the white world call them Negroes and Negro Americans – but that as soon as that particular historical era ended, the mass of black Americans declared that they were now to be called black.

And that, twenty years later, in the late 1980s, they added African American to the mix.

In other words, black Americans’ dynamic of naming names is a response to their continued effort to grasp the full measure of their American citizenship – a quest that is far from finished. So, if anyone thinks that “black” or “African American” is it for us, here’s a question: What will we call ourselves next?

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline