Interesting...I am an immigrant who vacationed in the US regularly until moving here permanently. I never knew I was a "colour" until I moved here.
I soon found out that the US Government many years ago decreed that if you had a drop of non-white blood, you were to be considered "black"...why not "brown"?
In my country of origin, your nationality was first, and your ethnicity was an after thought. Today I understand, things have changed. I don't think for the best.
I don't like African American. Why can't you be American? And if you are decribing someone , then you say dark skinned, light skinned...whatever?

Which colour? I'm a sort of pinkish with a tinge of peachy white I spose. It may point to my ancestral heritage and basic culture. That is all.

Always find it cringe worthy when someone refers to a black person as coloured. When you think about it, when a white person gets embarrassed s/he turns red, when the get sick they go green. White people should be the ones who are called coloured people. Seriously though, I have heard many people say they prefer to be called black as it is something they see as positive. In England its mainly the elder generation that use the term 'coloured' as 1 A lot of them don't care if they are being racist or not 2 its what would have been acceptable when they were younger, and 3 they probably associate the word 'black' as negative (black plague etc). What do you get when you add up all three reasons? IGNORANCE

we are all a colour and white or black are not but its the easiest way of explaining the difference. what I don't get is calling black people African Americans partly because the country you are born in is what you are. and the other part is a lot of Africans are not black or in fact white.

I just try to call everybody people or humans. That just takes all the other BS out of it. I mean that is what we all are , humans.

Among American blacks years ago, I don't know about now, the darkness or lightness made a difference among many southern black people. I know in South Africa during apartheid there was a separate catagory for people of mixed parentage. I just find it sad we are still discussing skin color in this day and age.

We are all persons of color. That's what melanin is about. No one on this planet is without color. The phrase, person of color, is absurd. Now, if a person wishes to identify themselves as black or red or brown or yellow or green or purple, that's their wish and I suppose it would be inconsiderate, even insulting to refer to them by some other term than the one they have chosen for themselves.

That is how dark skin people like blacks and Indians and Hispanics and Native American and Middle eastern Asians with dark completions are referred to by people of lighter skin shades to be politically correct.

I think you are over whelming this. Black is black. Some people actually think black person of color is politically correct.

The earliest know usage of the term for which I am aware in the US actually goes back to a bill that was signed in 1807. "An Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves into any Port or Place Within the Jurisdiction of the United States". It specifically references "any negro, mulatto, or person of colour".

The N word is forbidden for non-blacks. African American is incorrect because you don't have to descend (recently) from Africans to be black. Black may be considered incorrect because there are different shades of non-white and non-white sounds like you have a problem, as if white were the standard and non-white are defective people. We're running out of words here

edit: also, "black" and "people of color" was historically used to differentiate black slaves and free blacks (not that the latter were considered free men), so calling a black person "black" would give them genetic PTSD.

I don't know. Never heard that.

People of color (our American spelling) is a group term that refers to not only Black but also, Hispanic, Asian, Indian, Native American and all that are not Caucasian.