I consider myself to be a normal intelligent human being, but I do have my failings. Regardless how long one lives you can never stop learning and today, I’m not ashamed to admit but probably ashamed to say, I only just learnt what the letters IDP stood for!

The revealation came during research into a story on the genocide in Darfur in which the Sudanese government are apparently allowing Arab soldiers to massacre droves of Black indigenous people and a UNICEF worker kept making reference to “an IDP” in her story. [Read the article here].

After consulting various reference manuals and websites I finally came across this definition of the letters IDP: Internally Displaced Person. And that’s when the realisation hit me: I had never heard this term before!

There really isn’t any logical excuse I can give why this should be such a massive surprise to me. But, I did reason in a kind of self righteous way, that if I did not know what it meant let alone familiar with it, then maybe others might also be in the same situation but probably not as honest in saying so!

In essence a displaced person is one who is thrown out, removed or separated from wherever it is they would normally live, stay or sheltered. The “internally” bit suggest, in this case, this is inside their local country. Put it all together and you get the full meaning.

After satisfying myself with that conclusion I looked up what other meanings “IDP” has. Here are a few others being used around the world:-

• Internally Displaced Person
  Peace In Sri Lanka
• Indicators of Development Progress
  www.dfid.gov.uk/aboutdfid/files/glossary_i.htm
• Individual Development Plan
  corpslakes.usace.army.mil/employees/glossmain.html
• Individualized Development Plan.
  outreach.missouri.edu/staff/marketing/acromyns.html
• Individual Development Plan
  www.bgfl.org/services/gifted/glossary.htm
• /I-D-P/ v.,n. [Usenet] Abbreviation for Internet Death Penalty
  info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/i.html
• 20/20 Insight GOLD’s unique individual development planning software.
  www.2020insight.net/Faqs/faqglossary.htm
• Internet Datagram Protocol.
  www.hifn.com/support/Glossary_I.html
• initial-delay position
  155.217.58.58/cgi-bin/atdl.dll/fm/90-13/GLOSSARY.HTML
• Interac® Direct Payment (IDP) is the EFT/POS service, developed by the Interac Association, which allows cardholders to use their banking cards to pay for purchases at participating retailers.
  www.cashcityatm.com/atm/atmglossary.htm
• Initial Domain Part
  www.cisco.com/…guide_chapter09186a00800d81cb.html
• Integrated detector/preamplifier.
  www.aefos.com/html/glossary/i.htm

Whether Black is a positive or negative word depends on how you use it

The Oxford English Dictionary contains evidence of the use of black with reference to African peoples as early as 1400, and certainly the word has been in wide use in racial and ethnic contexts ever since.

However, it was not until the late 1960s that black (or Black) gained its present status as a self-chosen ethnonym with strong connotations of racial pride, replacing the then-current Negro among Blacks and non-Blacks alike with remarkable speed.

Equally significant is the degree to which Negro became discredited in the process, reflecting the profound changes taking place in the Black community during the tumultuous years of the civil rights and Black Power movements. The recent success of African American offers an interesting contrast in this regard.

Though by no means a modern coinage, African American achieved sudden prominence at the end of the 1980s when several Black leaders, including Jesse Jackson, championed it as an alternative ethnonym for Americans of African descent. The appeal of this term is obvious, alluding as it does not to skin color but to an ethnicity constructed of geography, history, and culture, and it won rapid acceptance in the media alongside similar forms such as Asian American, Hispanic American, and Italian American.

But unlike what happened a generation earlier, African American has shown little sign of displacing or discrediting black, which remains both popular and positive.

The difference may well lie in the fact that the campaign for African American came at a time of relative social and political stability, when Americans in general and Black Americans in particular were less caught up in issues involving radical change than they were in the 1960s. ·Black is sometimes capitalised in its racial sense, especially in the African-American press, though the lowercase form is still widely used by authors of all races.

The capitalization of Black does raise ancillary problems for the treatment of the term white. Orthographic evenhandedness would seem to require the use of uppercase White, but this form might be taken to imply that whites constitute a single ethnic group, an issue that is certainly debatable.

Uppercase White is also sometimes associated with the writings of white supremacist groups, a sufficient reason of itself for many to dismiss it. On the other hand, the use of lowercase white in the same context as uppercase Black will obviously raise questions as to how and why the writer has distinguished between the two groups. There is no entirely happy solution to this problem.

In all likelihood, uncertainty as to the mode of styling of white has dissuaded many publications from adopting the capitalised form Black.

Dysgenics (or down-breeding)
The process of increased negative genetic changes (retrogression) in a species. An example being an intelligent high l.Q. White woman giving birth to a low I.Q. mulatto baby.

Manumission
To free from slavery or bondage; emancipate.

Miscegenation
Same definition as above, used to describe the many now, invalid state laws prohibiting White / Black liaisons.

Mongrelization
The inter-breeding of different races into a hybrid (mixed) race.

Mulatto
The offspring of a White/Black interracial couple (half Negro).

Octaroon
Person having one Black greatgrandparent (one-eighth Negro).

Quadroon
Person who has one black grandparent (one-fourth Negro).