Colored

Colored (or coloured) is a racial descriptor historically used in the United States during the Jim Crow era to refer to an African American.

[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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[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].

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).