MSNBC host Joy Reid took on a C-SPAN caller who opposed the use of the term "Black" to label African-Americans.
During Tuesday's Washington Journal program, Reid fielded a question from a woman.
"Around the time of Medgar Evers, you know, you had the signs of, you know, Negroes and colored people, this and, you know, all of that," the caller said. "Why are we still using the synonym Black? There are no Black people."
"If we're going to start calling immigrants that come through the border brown people, let's call the brown people, all the brown people, brown people and, like, really take hold of the narrative instead of, like, I don't know if people have actually looked up the color black in the dictionary," she continued. "It's not something, why would you want to call your children that?"
The caller pointed out that black "means darkness, void."
"You know, that's part of the discrimination," she said. "We are not black people. We are brown."
Reid argued that the term "black" empowers people.
"Because the term Negro was, is a made up term that was made up by white supremacists in order to label Black people who came from multiple ethnic groups and throw them all together," she explained. "So when Africans were taken in slavery to America, you're mixing tribes that had no genetic relationship other than all being Negro."
"And so the idea of whiteness and blackness was invented in America," she noted. "It didn't exist before the 16th century. No white people in Europe who are all different ethnicities, whether they're Italian or Greek or British or German, they didn't call themselves white."
Reid said enslavers used the word Negro "to distinguish themselves from the Africans and distinguish themselves from the indigenous who they called savages."
"And so when people reclaimed the term black in the 1960s, it was because they had decided to empower themselves," the MSNBC host observed. "It was a term that felt to them more powerful than simply using the term Negro, which had been invented by enslavers."
"So I don't see any problem with black," she added. "Black is a term that can mean power. It can mean beauty. It doesn't have to mean darkness and horror."
