Biographical or announcement stories
- Be careful about using race or ethnicity to describe a person as the
first to accomplish a specific feat. Firsts are important, but race and
ethnicity shouldn't be overemphasized. Reserve race or ethnicity for
significant, groundbreaking or historic events such as winning a Nobel
Prize, being named chief justice or becoming mayor. By overplaying race
or ethnicity, ones achievement may seem dependent on that instead of
fag, faggot: Originally
offensive word for homosexual male, although some gay men now are
reclaiming it. The word still is offensive when used as an epithet.
firsts: Use first black or first
African American regarding a persons or groups achievement only when
relevant and proven. (See ethnicity, race.)
forced busing: Avoid because of possible negative connotations. Busing is sufficient.
Freaknic, Freaknik: Annual
spring break gathering of thousands of black college students in
Atlanta. Freaknic started in 1982 as a picnic planned by college
students in Washington. The name combined the title of a popular 1980s
song, The Freak by disco group Chic, and the word picnic. The names
spelling changed from Freaknic to the preferred Freaknik, but the
versions still are interchanged. In 1997, the city of Atlanta began
calling the event Black College Spring Break. Today, other incarnations
are held in Daytona, Fla.; Houston and Galveston, Texas, and Biloxi,
411: Slang for information.
ghetto, inner city: Terms used
as synonyms for sections of cities inhabited by poor people or
minorities. Avoid these descriptions because of their negative
connotations. Often the name of the neighborhood is the best choice.
Section, district or quarter may also be used. Urban is also acceptable.
ghetto blaster, ghetto box: Do not use to describe a big portable radio. Boom box is acceptable.
Gullah: Creole blend of
Elizabethan English and African languages, born of necessity on Africa's
slave coast and developed in slave communities of isolated plantations
of the coastal South. Even after the Sea Islands were freed in1861, the
Gullah speech flourished because of the islands separation from the
mainland. Access to the islands was by water until the 1950s. (See Sea
Great Migration, The: Mass
movement by Southern blacks relocating to the North and West in early
20th century. Although slavery had been illegal for three decades by the
1890s, Southern blacks generally felt a new de facto form of slavery.
Lynchings, Jim Crow laws and economic hardship made them feel as if
little had improved since emancipation. From the 1890s to 1970s, a great
migration of Southern blacks moved to the Promised Land of the North in
search of better jobs and greater racial tolerance. (See Jim Crow.)