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Sponsor ANTI-NEGRO DEFAMATION LEAGUE INC. (ANDL)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Submission to Office of Management & Budget Race and Ethnicity | NEGRO | Proposal (4)
April 27, 2023
Dear Office of Management and Budget (OMB),
The New Negro Republic is a Lineage Society established to restore, preserve and uplift the legacy, history and quality life of American Negro People. Our pillars rest upon the restoration, protection and safe guarding of our name and unique lineage. Our society has been made aware of the Federal Interagency Technical Working Group on Race and Ethnicity Standards for revising OMB's 1997 Statistical Policy Directive No. 15 (Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity) and are concerned with section (4) in your proposal, “Updating Terminology” which recommendation is to remove “Negro” from the Black or African American definition.
“Negro” has its own definition and designation which can be found in eCFR Title 36 sec. 906.2 defined as; Negro — is an individual of the Negro Race of African origin. This definition is currently updated on the 2022-2023 fiscal budget which began on July 1, 2022, in the Department of the Interior. When researching the race and ethnicity updates of “Black” added to the OMB in 1977 and “African American” added in 1997, the definition for Black or African American — A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa, is not the same as that of “Negro”. With this understanding, our request is for “Negro” to not be removed and to continue its codification as stated in eCFR Title 36 sec. 906.2. The only clarifying addition to consider should be that of Nationality, so a box which list; Negro American or American Negro — is an individual of the Negro Race of African origin is requested for the purpose of updating terminology. The current definitions of Black or African American should be separated from “Negro” because it includes over 3,000 ethnic groups from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Caribbean Islands and does not reflect the individual history of the Negro race/ethnic group in America which began in 1619 as, “20 and odd Negroes” landing in Jamestown, Virginia.
Our call-to-action to not remove “Negro” also aligns with the national push for data disaggregation and delineation for descendants of American chattel slavery, as this term is codified with precedent across State and Federal Laws since the colonial period, defining the enslaved and formerly enslaved as “Negroes”. In 1639, Virginia Act 226 becomes the first law to differentiate the Negro from the population by being the only people group prohibited from bearing arms. 1640 in Virginia Colony, a Negro named John Punch was sentence to perpetual servitude in the first legal sanctioning of slavery for life for being a runaway. In 1662, Virginia Act XII established, a child born to an enslaved Negro woman was also enslaved. The statue “condition of the mother” would create a bloodline connection between the Negro and slave status
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solidifying a race, lineage and ethnic people group with a political status that is shared by blood not skin complexion, later defined as the 1-drop rule. This was enforced through laws not limited to but include the following; Slave Codes of 1705, Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and 1850, 1854 California State Supreme Court ruling, People v. Hall, which states, “The word " black” may include all negroes, but the term "negro" does not include all black persons, 1857 Dred Scott case ruling Negroes whether enslaved or free had citizenship rights, Black codes, Jim Crow laws and the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. These laws and statues give unquestionable reasoning for the term “Negro” becoming permanently safe guarded as our ethnic identity by way of blood quantum and genetic make-up to be reassigned and uniformly coded throughout all Federal Departments where race and ethnicity information is requested or required with eCFR Title 36 sec. 906.2 Negro definition.
This is further supported by the 1939 Physician Handbook on Birth and Death Registration, released by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Census Bureau to ensure the birth certificate process which began in 1902 was done properly. It states; Color or Race of father and mother. “When either belongs to the white (Caucasian) race, write white. Otherwise, racial origin should be described by stating what people or race each parent belongs, as Indian, Negro, Chinese, etc.” In the United States, a birth certificate is a (Prima Facie) legal document of identification for lineage, inheritance, citizenship and proof of ancestry. In many court cases like Sunseri v. Cassagne (1940) or in the case of Susie Gulliory Phillip (1982), the birth certificates of ones ancestry served as grounds to confirm the race of the person, and in those cases, a courts refused to change their race designation from “Negro” to “White”. The usage of color descriptions, whether it be Black, Colored or Mulatto, which are all generic terms on the Census, were designated based on the percentage of traceable Negro blood. From the introduction of the “Free Colored Person” category on the 1820 census to the first usage of lowercase “negro or of negro descent” on the 1900 census, this term has been fixed to designate a people of unified bloodline, that was further codified between 1930-1970 returning all mulatto’s as Negro, whether “White passing” or not. Signs that said, “No Negroes Allowed”, was not a reference to darkness of skin color, but of the limitations in legal status Negro blood gave. So we come to you very concerned as to why there is an attempt to remove our ethnic identity, when it is clearly defined in eCFR Title 36 sec. 906.2 as our race. We elevate further complaint towards the lack of clear communicate from the OMB in specifying how these terms are defined and coded differently federally with “Negro” reflecting our true and accurate history as survivors of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Chattel Slavery, not to be flattened with every Black racial group in Africa. Africa does not have “racial” groups and we are an original people with varying levels of admixture of American Indian and European through forced breeding, but nonetheless, still Negro.
The instruction for designating a “Black Person” in Title 36 Chapter XII of the National Archives Catalog (NARA), guidance for replacing “negro” states; “Due to its complex history, negro cannot be uniformly replaced with another term in NARA’s archival descriptions or authority records. Each instance must be reviewed for context. Black is the preferred term when referring to an individual’s race. The term should be capitalized and used as an adjective, not as a noun. — African American (pl. African Americans) is also acceptable, but it is not necessarily interchangeable with Black. Black can be used regardless of nationality, while African American is specific to Americans of African, and especially Black African, descent. Some individuals in the United States self-identify with both terms, while others prefer one term over the other.” The “especially” in the NARA guidance instruction doesn’t mean “exclusively” and the usage of “Black” as an adjective and not a noun regardless of nationality, further emphasizes the difference in definition between race (noun) and racial (adjective). Noting the difference in race of people verses racial group. The latter is recommended to use as an adjective to categorize people based a superficial characteristics, hence why replacing negro cannot be done uniformly with another term (noun). Examples of this can be seen in comparing the racial designation of former President Barack Obama, current Vice President Kamala Harris to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and Poet Phillis Wheatley. All of which can be described as “Black or African American” but only Dr. King and Ms. Wheatley can uniformly be designated as “Negro” both being of the Negro Race.
Due to the way race classification has changed over time mainly to self-identification in the OMB Standards that was introduced in 1970, to capture the different groups that fall under the Hispanic ethnicity, we see how this confusion has played a detrimental role in the erasure of the Negro race, pointing to the painful past of slavery, targeted policies and violence after emancipation, that has historically boxed the “Negro” out of fully accessing economic and social opportunities. The misrepresentation of our term in all forms of media, Negrophobia within the halls of Academia and America’s guilt has all played a role in miseducating the general public with false claims of the term “Negro” as being offensive undermining the many accomplishments and celebrated heroes who transformed the term from slave designation to esteemed American Negro inventors, scholars, human and civil rights leaders and beyond. In 2020 a Nebraska woman pleaded with the state to remove “Negro” from her birth certificate believing it was derogatory and would prefer it left blank or replaced with “Black”. This is no new phenomena, in the late 1960s there began some calls for moving away from the term “Negro”, to embrace “Black”, which research proves was a largely divided sentiment amongst Negro Americans, pointing to a 1969 Newsweek article where “Negro” was favored as the most like and least disliked term well after the 1966 “Black Power” speech and ‘I’m Black and I’m Proud” record. As described on the Census website the addition of “Black” to the race and ethnicity category of Negro or Black in 1970 was to “link ethnic pride that flourished as a result of the Civil Rights Movement”. This describes “self-determination” which was the core message of the movement, demanding for equity towards our pursuits of happiness. One cannot “self identify” out of their ethnicity so we now understand “self-identification” was being weaponized to absorb our trauma response towards the historic injustices we’ve enduring for a self- esteem booster in a new term that offered no economic power or social advancement for the Negro. When the OMB added a different definition for “Black” in 1977, it no longer represented the Negro race and our continued fight for civil rights since 1865. The same can be said about the addition of African American which sparked debates in the late 1980s. A New York Times article in 1989 details a push from the “Black intellectual” audience to take on this new term cloaked in the same manner to absorb the pain of a national crisis known as the “crack epidemic" to look for more “ethnic pride” in a renewed connection with Africa by simply changing our name to African American. This was emphasized when Civil Rights Leader Jesse Jackson said, “Black tells you about skin color and what side of town you live on. African-American evokes discussion of the world.” Polls of the time reveal the term “African American” was never favored by the majority of our Negro population, but was still added to the OMB by 1997. The second phase of the civil rights movement was to focus on economic growth and advancement but was subverted by identity politics preying on our trauma and torn past with cultural symbolism. Understanding “self identification”, is subject to common, social and societal definitions, yet parent information for “race and ancestry” is still required on children birth certificates to inform policy decisions and allocations of federal funds to support various programs and research efforts, if a Negro cannot self identify legally as “White” when registering a child, we call to question why identifying as “Black or African American”, was allowed when “Negro” has historic precedence with its own designation and definition federally codified to address and report on the needs of our Negro population on a national level.
With this discovery, we bring to light an urgency to review the Federal resource allocations, audit departments and policy delivery reports for the people group described in eCFR Title 36 sec. 906.2 defined as; Negro — is an individual of the Negro Race of African origin, since the OMB’s self identification addition of Black (1977) and African American (1997). We suspect that the lack of clear communication and guidance on how terms differ from definition to code in the OMB federal register has led to a hindrance of the Federal Governments ability to track and service the Negro population with federal policies designed to address our socioeconomic positioning required since Executive Order 10925, Executive Order 11246 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The history of executive orders and civil rights acts led to the establishment of Affirmative Action Polices (Minority Group Member categories) and federal enforcement to address discrimination in federal contracting, public services, labor and other. The 1966 White House Conference “To Fulfill These Rights”, which served as a economic plan of action for the Negro American integrating into the dominant society has the most comprehensive federal policy directive since the failed promise of Special Field Order No. 15, which both addressed Negro hardships exclusively with an independent vision ingrained in the policy. SFO No. 15’s “The Negro is Free and should be dealt with as such’ with commercial points heretofore named in orders, to afford the settlers the opportunity to supply their necessary wants, and to sell the products of their land and labor.”, is a dream deferred in the 1966 To Fulfill These Rights implementation plan’s Introduction statement, “There is no more ugly and urgent crisis facing the nation today than the economic insecurity of Negro Americans, an unending cycle of human devastation and national loss is at the core of this crucial problem. The usage of the term “Negro” is to identify the people group which are the descendants of slavery and not all “racially” described Black people, people of color or combined minority groups. When Congresswoman Grace Meng introduced H.R. 4238, which purpose was to “modernize terms relating to minorities” in the Department of Energy organization Act and the Local Public Works Capital Development and Investment Act, we reviewed the congressional hearing and read the transcript by Reps Grace Meng (D.NY), Bobby Rush (D.IL) and Ed Whitfield (R.KY) from February 29, 2016, and cannot confirm any mention of the removal of the term “Negro” debated or reasoned by anyone. A press release on Grace Meng’s government website on the day Former President Obama signed the bill, concluded that Meng and the 51 other AAPI cosponsors of this bill wanted to remove “Oriental”. There is no mention of her desire to remove “Negro” from Federal Law whatsoever. All press and media information we have gathered of this removal are dated after the signage of the bill. We have also discovered the “21st Century Respect Act”, introduced by Congressman Hakeem Jeffries in 2017 and 2019, whom wants to strike the usage of “Negro” in eCFR Title 7 sec. 1901.202 replacing it with “Black or African American” and wants to strike the definition of “Negro” in eCFR Title 36 sec. 906.2 to be replaced with the definition of “Black or African American”, confirming our understanding that “Negro”, has its own designation and is being mistakenly or purposely targeted. The implications of this discovery are found in the very Acts the term “Negro” has been removed and the current bill H.R. 381 introduced in the House of representatives in 2019.
Looking at H.R. 4238, The Department of Energy has an Office of Minority Programs and Office of Minority Economic Impact within their Office of Economic Impact and Diversity which allocates federal funds to minorities. Removing “Negro” from Title 42 replacing it with “Black or African American” denies access for federal allocations to our specific Negro people group. The Local Public Works Capital and Investment Act and Public Works Employment Act authorized through the Economic Development Administration has a Minority Business Development Agency and Minority Business Enterprise which also distributes federal allocations in grant awards, employment and contracts designed for economic stimulation for minority groups. Replacing “Negro” with “Black or African American” showcases the continued structural violence towards the Negro population proving why we’re still experiencing economic deprivation for over 6 decades disconnected from Affirmative Action polices first introduced in 1961 by John F. Kennedy. We also are concerned with the reporting and resource allocations from Small Business Administration, (SBA), Minority and Women Owned Business Agencies (MWBE) and Federal Grant and Cooperative Agreement Act which was established like many of these programs in 1976 and 1977 at the same time as the OMB created Statistical Policy Directive No. 15.
Reviewing the H.R. 381 “21st Century Respect Act” recommendations to replace “Negro” with “Black or African American” in the Department of Agriculture, eCFR Title 7 sec. 1901.202 which references nondiscrimination in financial assistance, has left us with the belief that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) discrimination lawsuits aren’t accurately reporting the harm done to Negro Americans. Was the more than 2 decades long class action lawsuit filed by the Black Farmers against the USDA a drawback for the simple error of filing as “Black or African American” and not Negro? What are the setbacks if a Negro American checks Black or African American on federal forms? Referring back to the Department of the Interior’s definition for “Negro” which is also subject of being removed and redefined, we count this and all stated instances of removal as harms and a reoccurring civil rights violation of Title 42, Title, 6 and Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Affirmative Action polices. We holding the Office Of Management and Budget as the responsible agency for failure to communicate from 1970 to 2023, the negative impacts of Negro Americans falling under the guise of “Black or African American” when there is a United States Federal Code definition and designation for our people group (eCFR Title 36 sec. 906.2 defined as; Negro — is an individual of the Negro Race of African origin). This has not only skewed our representation but has harmfully diverted needed resources by identifying within conflated minority member group. We also site the removal of “Negro” on the 2020 census as a denial of our god given unalienable right s of Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness. Further pointing to the failure of the OMB to fulfill its mission of SPD 15. to “provide consistent data on race and ethnicity to monitor and enforce civil right to equal access in housing, education, employment, and other areas for populations that historically had experienced discrimination and differential treatment because of their race or ethnicity”, is negligence when emphasizing the OMB’s working relationship with the Executive Branch to influence policymaking, Presidential budgeting, and priority practices. We can no longer engage in “respectability politics” of what’s an “offensive” or “antiquated” term when the agency itself promotes self identification, and eCFR Title 36 sec. 906.2 still has “Negro” is on the Fiscal Budget for 2022-2023, whereas Negroes across the nation can use it on documents to safe guard federal resources for our lineage.
Self determination of the Negro American was misconstrued with Self-identification and the broadness of racial group designations not being specific to our unique people group has economically disenfranchised and segregated us from the pool of trillions in federal resources and minority programs. This has limited our ability to buildout and become institutional services providers in all areas of people activity to aid in our socioeconomic crisis as well as locking us out of generational wealth building which together has imposed living conditions intending to destroy our people group. This was defined at the Geneva Convention as one of the 5 acts Genocide. The targeted attempt to remove not just the term but the definition of our Negro race out of existence, is confirmation of ethnocide which has never ended since the killing fields of the plantation and concentrated physical and economic terrorisms on our livelihood. The words of Margaret Sanger “We don’t want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro Population” are ever present and devastating to find in this SPD No. 15 process which has been reopened to us for the first time since 1997 only to see our term “Negro” still in threat for removal.
The other 4 acts of Genocide are as follows; (2) In 2021 Anti-Black or African American hate crimes continue to be the largest race based bias incident category at 56.1%. Hidden in these DOJ/FBI numbers is the reality that majority of these attacks are towards the Negro population, as evident with the Buffalo shooting Massacre of 2022. (3) Growing research is demonstrating that racial trauma linked to racism and discrimination is a chronic stressor that impacts the mental and physical health of Black or African Americans. Hidden in the APA numbers is the people group most impacted is the Negro population. (4) Black or African American women are 3 times likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause, more than twice as likely to experience a stillbirth and are 40% of women who get abortions, amounting in more than 30 million combined fatalities. Hidden in the CDC numbers is the majority of those death are in the Negro population. (5) 53% of Black or African American families are more likely subjected to child protective services investigations and to have their children at risk of being removed and placed out of the home. Hidden in these DOHHS numbers is Negro children are removed more frequently due to implicit bias and racism.
In closing, we a demand the suspension of proposal (4) and call for an agency wide audit across all Federal Departments which contain minority polices, extracting all data reflecting the (Negro Race) defined in eCFR Title 36 sec. 906.2 to study all implications of socioeconomic disenfranchisement since 1961, and if any of this has to do with self-identifying on forms as “Black or African American”. This is a full misrepresentation our people group relegating us unable to access specific set-asides and earmarked funds established by multiple policy directive created to remedy the legacy of racism and discrimination that currently has the Negro population in a state of economic decline and crisis since integration, with an ownership stake of less than 1/2 of 1 percent of the nations wealth and the highest unemployment rate amongst all Americans amplifying calls for reparations. While some economist estimate racism has cost the U.S $16 trillion, Dr. Sandy Darity estimates reparations is only $14 trillion. We at NNR estimate those numbers would look much different if not for this hidden legacy of erasure all over which “term” we should self-identify as. Lastly, we call on Steven Horsford, the current Chair of Congressional Black Caucus and previous Chair G. K. Butterfield who was seated in 2016 when H.R. 4238 was signed into law to assist in this matter. CBC founding member Congressman Parren Mitchell, is credited for amending The Public Works Employment Act in 1977 requiring 10% of each Federal Construction project be awarded to minorities, creating a pathway of wealth building through the 8(a) Program and garnering success stories like Billionaire David Steward, the second richest Negro American in America and 5th in the world. Help us help ourselves, through self determination as American Negroes with true access.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR COMMITMENT
Rashid Littlejohn
Chairman
New Negro Republic | Lineage Society
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