Labour frontbencher Diane Abbott "coloured".

What's wrong with saying brown? I've no problem with that, don't know anyone who does.

I don't know a single 'brown' Asian who is either. Infact they all use it to describe themselves.

I think it's another case of some white person with too much time on their hands looking to be offended on someone else's behalf.
 
I don't know a single 'brown' Asian who is either. Infact they all use it to describe themselves.

I think it's another case of some white person with too much time on their hands looking to be offended on someone else's behalf.
'Brown' is appropriate for south Asian people, but using it for black people is incorrect, which is where this thread of the conversation started.
 
But "black" people aren't actually black, they range from light brown to very dark brown...

Just as white people aren't actually white.
 
'Coloured' is an antiquated term and anyone who uses it clearly has no black acquaintances.
but is it really, it seems to change every decade what is acceptable.
back in the late 90s and early 00s if I said someone is black in Nottingham I would probably have got my head kicked in, but seemed coloured was fine.

maybe it varies from region to region but it's all BS anyway.

if its obviously not intended to be racist then should people really care?
 
but is it really, it seems to change every decade what is acceptable.
back in the late 90s and early 00s if I said someone is black in Nottingham I would probably have got my head kicked in, but seemed coloured was fine.

maybe it varies from region to region but it's all BS anyway.

if its obviously not intended to be racist then should people really care?
Same here in London in the 1970's and early 1980's. If I called someone black I'd have been deemed racist and told "Does my skin actually look black?". Coloured was the term we were told to use back then. By the mid 1990's things had moved on. I once addressed someone at work as coloured and was immediately corrected and told to call them black. No offense was meant at all and I've avoided the term since.

I think what happened was that in the UK we had historically used the term black to refer to immigrants in a derogative way and signs such as "no blacks" in peoples windows were not uncommon. But since that time we started getting a lot of influence from the US and the term coloured / colored was heavily associated with segregation over there (signs such as "no coloreds", etc). So in the past 'black' was derogatory in the UK and 'colored' was derogatory in the US. We've since adopted the US terms.

UK example of 'no blacks' (yes I know the article says this particular sign may not be genuine):
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/oct/21/no-irish-no-blacks-no-dogs-no-proof

US example of no 'coloreds':

https://edition.cnn.com/2012/01/22/opinion/greene-racial-signs/index.html

Unfortunately older people (myself included) have made mistakes because the terms have changed over time. But I would expect a politician to keep themselves up to date on the terms so it is less excusable. However I do feel that Diane Abbott is playing the race card to try to make political gain from it. She should simply have highlighted the problem and asked Amber Rudd to be more careful, rather than insinuating racism.
 
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Coloured is considered offensive because it was the term used in America back in the early 1900s to segregate whites from blacks.

It was never really a term used here, and it certainly wasn't meant to be offensive. At the rate new words are being created to "label" people its hard to keep up. I'm sure someone somewhere would be offended by the word flibbertigibbet.
 
It’s a shame some of the terms which people use lightheartedly have become offensive too.

I have quite a few Irish friends and not one gets annoyed at being called a paddy, but it’s considered offensive. A few even refer to themselves as paddies. It’s a play on Ireland’s most popular name. It used to be done by some in England too when they’d refer to English strangers as John.
 
These words originated in the USA and S.Africa during the segregation eras, 'no coloured's allowed on this bus' etc. even the offensive word ni***r has it's origins in a deep south pronunciation of Negro's which became Nigras and eventually the r was dropped.
Nigreos is simply Latin for black, some plants have the word Nigra in their latin name if they have dark foliage

At one time in the recent past it was considered grossly offensive to call someone 'black' but now it's the opposite
 
It's the outrage culture.

People are offended on other peoples behalf.

I'm a disabled person but if someone used the word handicapped (which I *think* goes back to an old word meaning cap in hand i.e. a begger etc) I wouldnt think it was a sign of their hatred of disabled people, or me. I would just think they either don't know the word as gone out of fashion or they made a mistake. I wouldn't treated it like there was some big agenda going on.

I remember when we used to have blackboards at school and when they were changed to white boards it was said that blackboards were racist. I remember asking an Indian guy I knew if he was offended by the blackboard being used? He said it never crossed his mind.

There is a lot of racism inside the black community too. Recently we have the Will Smith situation were people said he wasn't black enough to play to Serena and Venus William's father in a film https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47468011

Between colourism and skin whitening products, white people are probably the least racist of any race. We make up at most 9% of the world population and are the only group to have the full force of politically correct propaganda pushed on to us, reminding us at every turn we made a mistake, though interesting we're the most diverse countries and the most tolerant according to the latest data.

Bottom line is discrimination is wrong. But the accusation becomes dialuted when we start including people who made genuine mistakes in their language.
 
Between colourism and skin whitening products, white people are probably the least racist of any race. We make up at most 9% of the world population and are the only group to have the full force of politically correct propaganda pushed on to us, reminding us at every turn we made a mistake, though interesting we're the most diverse countries and the most tolerant according to the latest data..

9% of the world and maybe 1% of who are actually racists.

Meanwhile, visit majority black countries as a white guy....
 
maybe 1% of who are actually racists.
Oh come now.

Far higher than that are racist. My own parents are racist. They're not kicking-black-people racist, but certainly horrified-if-their-kids-bring-home-a-dark-skinned-partner racist. And I've worked with lots of people similarly set.
 
Inb4 the ‘i didn’t mean it like that’ with no sense of the fact that it would be confirming that Rudd was being uncouth.

Either way I’d rather believe this report than someone’s ****** opinion.

https://www.jpr.org.uk/publication?id=9993

2 to 30% are hard anti Semitic to soft anti Semitic in the uk alone. Considering the very low bar set for being anti Semitic, I’m more likely to use later figure as it’s about as bad as Rudd’s poor choice of word and a lot of people’s poor choice of descriptors.

It is not ‘1%’.
 
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