Sean951 said:
Snowblindblitz said:
I've never heard the term negro used in real life. I had some black foster kids at one point, and they used the phrase nigga a lot. They laughed while they said it though.
Also, ever notice how black guys from England are English, but from America they are African Americans?
Pretty sure that's racist.
It's more a matter of self-identification than anything else. Same as people identify as Irish American or German American.
The problem comes when people assume that a person with dark skin in the US must not only be American, but must also identify as African-American.
My school supervisor was from Europe but was black, so she is in no way African-American, yet many uneducated kids defaulted to calling her that instead of just "black" (which she much preferred, since it at least was correct).
It lead to a funny situation when a kid said "black lady" in class, another kid tried to correct him, and then the corrector got corrected by the teacher and called him disrespectful.
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OT: Since biological race doesn't even exist, we should only use the most basic of descriptors and little more (black, white, Asian, etc). For colloquial language it gets more complex, but in general we as humanity SHOULD move away from using race, since it only exists in our minds and not in reality.
Edit: Oh, regarding negro, it's an ancient word as far as American-English goes, so while it may not be racist in use, it may get some odd looks by people making assumptions about you, and is not nearly as normal of a word as "black."