Colored (or coloured) is a racial descriptor historically used in the United States during the Jim Crow era to refer to an African American. In many places, it may be considered a slur. [1] It has taken on a special meaning in Southern Africa referring to a person of mixed or Cape Coloured heritage. [2]
The word colored (Middle English icoloured) was first used in the 14th century but with a meaning other than race or ethnicity. [3] [4] The earliest uses of the term to denote a member of dark-skinned groups of peoples occurred in the second part of the 18th century in reference to South America. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , "colored" was first used in this context in 1758 to translate the Spanish term mujeres de color ('colored women', literally 'women of color') in Antonio de Ulloa's A voyage to South America. [4]
The term came in use in the United States during the early 19th century, and it then was adopted by emancipated slaves as a term of racial pride after the end of the American Civil War until it was replaced as a self-designation by Black or African-American during the second part of the 20th century. Due to its use in the Jim Crow era to designate items or places restricted to African Americans, the word colored is now usually considered to be offensive. [4]
The term has historically had multiple connotations. In British usage, the term refers to "a person who is wholly or partly of non-white descent," and its use is generally regarded as antiquated or offensive. [5] [6] Other terms are preferable, particularly when referring to a single ethnicity.
In the United States, colored was the predominant and preferred term for African Americans in the mid- to late nineteenth century in part because it was accepted by both white and black Americans as more inclusive, covering those of mixed-race ancestry (and, less commonly, Asian Americans and other racial minorities), as well as those who were considered to have "complete Black ancestry". [7] They did not think of themselves as or accept the label African, did not want whites pressuring them to relocate to a colony in Africa, and said they were no more African than white Americans were European. In place of "African" they preferred the term colored, or the more learned and precise Negro . [8] However, the term Negro later fell from favor following the Civil Rights Movement as it was seen as imposed upon the community it described by white people during slavery, and carried connotations of subservience. The term black was preferred during the 1960s by the Black Power movement, as well as radical black nationalists (the Black Muslims and the Black Panthers), pan-Africanists (Stokely Carmichael, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and political progressives. "Negro" was still favored as self-descriptive racial term over "black" by a plurality in the late 1960s; however, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, "black" was strongly favored. [7]
NPR reported that the "use of the phrase 'colored people' peaked in books published in 1970." [9] However, some individuals have more recently called for a revival of "African American", or "Afro-American", so as to remove attention to skin color. [10] "Colored people lived in three neighborhoods that were clearly demarcated, as if by ropes or turnstiles", wrote Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. about growing up in segregated West Virginia in the 1960s. "Welcome to the Colored Zone, a large stretched banner could have said .... Of course, the colored world was not so much a neighborhood as a condition of existence." [11] "For most of my childhood, we couldn't eat in restaurants or sleep in hotels, we couldn't use certain bathrooms or try on clothes in stores", recalls Gates. His mother retaliated by not buying clothes that she was not allowed to try on. He remembered hearing a white man deliberately calling his father by the wrong name: "'He knows my name, boy,' my father said after a long pause. 'He calls all colored people George.'" When Gates's cousin became the first black cheerleader at the local high school, she was not allowed to sit with the team and drink Coke from a glass, but had to stand at the counter drinking from a paper cup. [11] Gates also wrote about his experiences in his 1995 book, Colored People: A Memoir. [12]
In 1851, an article in The New York Times referred to the "colored population". [13] [ full citation needed ] In 1863, the War Department established the Bureau of Colored Troops.
The first 12 United States Census counts counted "colored" people, who totaled nine million in 1900. The censuses of 1910–1960 counted "negroes".
The term is still used in the name of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, although it is generally referred to as the NAACP. [5] In 2008, its communications director Carla Sims said "the term 'colored' is not derogatory, [the NAACP] chose the word 'colored' because it was the most positive description commonly used [in 1909, when the association was founded]. It's outdated and antiquated but not offensive." [14] However, NAACP today rarely uses its full name and made this decision not long after the United Negro College Fund switched to using just UNCF or United Fund.
In South Africa and neighboring countries, the term Coloureds refers to a multiracial ethnic group native to Southern Africa who have ancestry from more than one of the populations inhabiting the region, including indigenous (Khoisan, Bantu and others), Whites (including Afrikaners), Austronesian, East Asian, or South Asian [15] (also called Cape Malays; it was once a subcategory of the Apartheid Coloured racial grouping). Under Apartheid, South Africa broadly classified its population into four races, namely Blacks, Whites, Coloureds and Indians. [16]
Black is a racialized classification of people, usually a political and skin color-based category for specific populations with a mid- to dark brown complexion. Not all people considered "black" have dark skin; in certain countries, often in socially based systems of racial classification in the Western world, the term "black" is used to describe persons who are perceived as dark-skinned compared to other populations. It is most commonly used for people of sub-Saharan African ancestry, Indigenous Australians and Melanesians, though it has been applied in many contexts to other groups, and is no indicator of any close ancestral relationship whatsoever. Indigenous African societies do not use the term black as a racial identity outside of influences brought by Western cultures.
In the English language, nigger is a racial slur directed at black people. Starting in the 1990s, references to nigger have been increasingly replaced by the euphemistic contraction "the N-word", notably in cases where nigger is mentioned but not directly used. In an instance of linguistic reappropriation, the term nigger is also used casually and fraternally among African Americans, most commonly in the form of nigga, whose spelling reflects the phonology of African-American English.
Miscegenation is a pejorative term for a marriage or admixture between people who are members of different races.
Mestizo is a person of mixed European and Indigenous American ancestry in the former Spanish Empire. In certain regions such as Latin America, it may also refer to people who are culturally European even though their ancestors were Indigenous. The term was used as an ethno-racial exonym for mixed-race castas that evolved during the Spanish Empire. It was a formal label for individuals in official documents, such as censuses, parish registers, Inquisition trials, and others. Priests and royal officials might have classified persons as mestizos, but individuals also used the term in self-identification. With the Bourbon reforms and the independence of the Americas, the caste system disappeared and terms like "mestizo" fell in popularity.
Cape Coloureds are a South African group of multiracial people who are from the Northern Cape and the Western Cape. Their ancestry comes from the interracial mixing between the White, the indigenous Khoi and San, the Xhosa plus other Bantu people and slaves imported from the Dutch East Indies. People from India and the islands within the Indian Ocean region were also taken to the Cape and sold into slavery by the Dutch settlers. Eventually all these ethnic and racial group intermixed with each forming a group of mixed race people that became the "Cape Coloureds".
Mulatto is a racial classification that refers to people of mixed African and European ancestry only. When speaking or writing about a singular woman in English, the word is mulatta. The use of this term began in the United States of America shortly after the Atlantic Slave Trade began and its use was widespread, derogatory and disrespectful. After the post Civil Rights Era, the term is now considered to be both outdated and offensive in America. In other Anglophone countries such as the British Isles, the Caribbean, and English and Dutch-speaking West Indian countries, the word mulatto is still used. The use of this word does not have the same negative associations found among English speakers. Among Latinos in both the US and Latin America, the word is used in every day speech and its meaning is a source of racial and ethnic pride. In four of the Latin-based languages, the default, masculine word ends with the letter "o" and is written as follows: Spanish and Portuguese – mulato; Italian – mulatto. The French equivalent is mulâtre. In English, the masculine plural is written as mulattoes while in Spanish and Portuguese it is mulatos. The masculine plural in Italian is mulatti and in French it is mulâtres. The feminine plurals are: English – mulattas; Spanish and Portuguese – mulatas; Italian – mulatte; French – mulâtresses.
The terms multiracial people refer to people who are of multiple races, and the terms multi-ethnic people refer to people who are of more than one ethnicities. A variety of terms have been used both historically and presently for multiracial people in a variety of contexts, including multiethnic, polyethnic, occasionally bi-ethnic, Métis, Muwallad, Melezi, Coloured, Dougla, half-caste, ʻafakasi, mestizo, mutt, Melungeon, quadroon, octoroon, sambo/zambo, Eurasian, hapa, hāfu, Garifuna, pardo, and Gurans. A number of these once-acceptable terms are now considered offensive, in addition to those that were initially coined for pejorative use.
Coloureds are multiracial people in South Africa, Namibia and to a less extent, Zimbabwe and Zambia. Their ancestry descends from the interracial marriages/interracial unions mainly between the European and the African with an addition of Asian in the mix.
Anglo is a prefix indicating a relation to, or descent from England, English culture, the English people or the English language, such as in the term Anglosphere. It is often used alone, somewhat loosely, to refer to people of British descent in Anglo-America, the Anglophone Caribbean, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. It is used in Canada to differentiate between Francophone Canadians, located mainly in Quebec but found across Canada, and Anglophone Canadians, also located across Canada, including in Quebec. It is also used in the United States to distinguish the Hispanic and Latino population from the non-Hispanic white majority.
In the colonial societies of the Americas and Australia, a quadroon or quarteron was a person with one-quarter African/Aboriginal and three-quarters European ancestry. Similar classifications were octoroon for one-eighth black and quintroon for one-sixteenth black.
The term "person of color" is primarily used to describe any person who is not considered "white". In its current meaning, the term originated in, and is primarily associated with, the United States; however, since the 2010s, it has been adopted elsewhere in the Anglosphere, including relatively limited usage in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, South Africa, and Singapore.
The one-drop rule was a legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th-century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of African ancestry is considered black. It is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.
Afro-Brazilians are an ethno-racial group consisting of Brazilians with predominantly or total Sub-Saharan African ancestry, these stand out for having dark skin. Most multiracial Brazilians also have a range of degree of African ancestry. Brazilians whose African features are more evident are generally seen by others as Blacks and may identify themselves as such, while the ones with less noticeable African features may not be seen as such. However, Brazilians rarely use the term "Afro-Brazilian" as a term of ethnic identity and never in informal discourse.
An ethnonym is a name applied to a given ethnic group. Ethnonyms can be divided into two categories: exonyms and autonyms, or endonyms.
Anti-Black racism, also called anti-Black sentiment, anti-Blackness, colourphobia or Negrophobia, is characterised by prejudice, collective hatred, and discrimination or extreme aversion towards people who are racialised as Black people, especially those people from sub-Saharan Africa and its diasporas, as well as a loathing of Black culture worldwide. Such sentiment includes, but is not limited to: the attribution of negative characteristics to Black people; the fear, strong dislike or dehumanization of Black men; and the objectification of Black women.
In the English language, the term negro is a term historically used to refer to people of Black African heritage. The term negro means the color black in Spanish and Portuguese, where English took it from. The term can be viewed as offensive, inoffensive, or completely neutral, largely depending on the region or country where it is used, as well as the time period and context in which it is applied. It has various equivalents in other languages of Europe.
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that enforced racial segregation, "Jim Crow" being a pejorative term for an African American. The last of the Jim Crow laws were generally overturned in 1965. Formal and informal racial segregation policies were present in other areas of the United States as well, even as several states outside the South had banned discrimination in public accommodations and voting. Southern laws were enacted by white-dominated state legislatures (Redeemers) to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by African Americans during the Reconstruction era. Such continuing racial segregation was also supported by the successful Lily-white movement.
There is no single system of races or ethnicities that covers all modern Latin America, and usage of labels may vary substantially.
Josephine Beall Willson Bruce was a women's rights activist in the late 1890s and early 1900s. She spent a majority of her time working for the National Organization of Afro-American Women. She was a prominent socialite in Washington, D.C., throughout most of her life where she lived with her husband, United States Senator Blanche Bruce. In addition to these accomplishments, she was the first black teacher in the public school system in Cleveland, and she eventually became a highly regarded educator at Tuskegee University in Alabama.
In times when commentators say the term is widely perceived as offensive, a Labour MP lost no time in condemning it "patronising and derogatory"
In Britain it was the accepted term until the 1960s, when it was superseded (as in the US) by black. The term coloured lost favour among black people during this period and is now widely regarded as offensive except in historical contexts
Definition of Afro-American: African American. First known use of Afro-American 1831, in the meaning defined above