Terms No Longer in Common Use
The terms mulatto and colored were widely used until the second quarter of the 20th century, when they were considered outmoded and generally gave way to the use of negro. By the 1940s, the term commonly was capitalized, Negro, but by the mid-1960s it was considered disparaging. By the end of the twentieth century "Negro" had come to be considered inappropriate and was rarely used and perceived as a pejorative. The term is rarely used by younger black people, but remained in use by many older black Americans who had grown up with the term, particularly in the southern U.S.
The word negro is the Spanish and Portuguese word for the color black. In regions such as Latin America where these languages are spoken, negro (pronounced slightly differently than Negro in English), is a normal word used without disparaging intent in relation to black people.
There are many other deliberately insulting terms. Many were in common use, but had become unacceptable in normal discourse before the end of the twentieth century.
Read more about this topic: African American, Terminology
Famous quotes containing the words terms, longer and/or common:
“Again we have here two distinctions that are no distinctions, but made to seem so by terms invented by I know not whom to cover ignorance, and blind the understanding of the reader: for it cannot be conceived that there is any liberty greater, than for a man to do what he will.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets—we remember only.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“There were none of the small deer up there; they are more common about the settlements. One ran into the city of Bangor two years before, and jumped through a window of costly plate glass, and then into a mirror, where it thought it recognized one of its kind.... This the inhabitants speak of as the deer that went a-shopping.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)