This phrase has existed for centuries, yet at some point its meaning became racist.

And it all started with figs.

Can you guess what it is?

I'm Len from Push Black.

This is too Many Black History,

what you didn't learn in school.

The Greeks coined the root phrase to call a fig a fig.

By 1542, the phrase had become to call a spade a spade.

How did the centuries-old phrase become racist?

A spade was just that, a small gardening instrument. Shortly after,

it was one of the suits of a deck of cards. It was all good until the Harlem Renaissance.

That association stuck after I mentioned in a novel title Home to Harlem, written in 1928. After that,

if you were dark skin, you were black as the ace of spades. The Great Migration irritated

white foes, and being called a spade became one more derogatory way to refer to black people.

In the 1950s, a British author used the term to fetishize black culture.

Gross, right?

Gross?

Yes.

Unexpected?

No.

Finally, by the late 1960s and in 1970s, we't see our liberation as crucial. reminds us of the importance of being mindful of our words and their impact, especially in a

society that doesn't see our liberation as crucial.

...