🚀 go-pugleaf

packer@amarna.gsfc.nasa.gov (Charles Packer) writes:

> In article <s705VB2w165w@netlink.cts.com>, galan@netlink.cts.com (Greg Gross)
> >That semantic change was one that worked from the inside-out.  For the 
> >first time in our history in this country, we were addressing ourselves 
> >by the term of our own choice. Newspapers gradually, even reluctantly, 
> 
> 
> ..told the white majority about it. And that's how whites came
> to adopt the new usage -- through the influence of the press.
> There was no other way they would have found out about it,
> social contact between blacks and whites being what it was then.
> And as for the "reluctance" factor, what you mean is that your
> editor was just waiting for the New York Times to do it... Enjoy
> the holidays, I'll be back next week to pick up the debate if
> necessary. 
> 


I don't know about where you live, but in Louisiana and Northern 
California, where I was while this change was taking place, there was 
plenty enough social contact among blacks and whites for whites to grasp 
that a change in nomenclature was underway. 

Perhaps some whites in Moscow, Idaho or Kalispell, MT learned of it 
through their local newspapers (or some other equally distant and 
sparesely populated regions where few blacks live, if any). Anywhere 
else, if whites needed newspapers to inform them of this change, then 
they just weren't paying attention to what was happening around them.

But then, there's nothing new there, either.

Bottom line, when it comes to trends or developments in racial matters 
inthis country, the American press neither leads nor creates. If 
anything, it spends what time it devotes to the matter at all playing a 
losing game of catch-up.

Hope your Christmas was Merry. I'll be waiting for you when you get back.
G.

--
Gregory Alan Gross      Welcome to life, where no good deed goes unpunished.
San Diego Union-Tribune         (619) 293-1270 (voice)
P.O. Box 191                    (619) 293-2333 (fax)
San Diego, CA 92112-4106        galan@netlink.cts.com (Internet)