Don't Blame Me If I Got the Name Wrong

A Gentle Reminder to a Generation

TO EVERYONE BORN OF AFRICAN DESCENDANT ON OR BEFORE 1950: In case you don't know or you don't want to remember, you are officially reminded that YOU WERE BORN COLORED or YOU WERE BORN A NEGRO or YOU WERE BORN COLORED THEN BECAME A NEGRO. Don't let anyone tell you any differently.

In Don't Blame Me if I Got the Name Wrong, author Barbara Tone Hilliard-Mims has gathered a bold and beautiful collection of anecdotes, memories, and family folklore that speak for a generation. It is about how a twenty-first century Black Woman remembers some of the fun things and some of the not-so-fun things that occurred when she was a young Colored girl growing up in Houston. "Events of the past were not always about the pain or about the struggles," Hilliard-Mims says. "There were bad times, yet we had good times, and funny times, too."

Don't Blame Me is "not a book on Colored history, Colored economics, Colored philosophy, or Colored politics," Hilliard-Mims writes. "But many of our younger generation speak derogatorily about their Colored ancestors. Their impressions, their comments, and their rhetoric are often negative, categorizing people as Uncle Toms or shuffling Step'n'fetchits, dreamers of unfulfilled dreams." Hilliard-Mims shatters many of these stereotypes, and shows how folks from her generation often proudly admit they lived their lives as Negros or Coloreds and cherish that cultural identity.

Hilliard-Mims, who "grew from a Colored child to a Black baby-boomer adult," is in a unique position to be able to compare how something as seemingly simple as a racial name change can have a lasting effect on a people.