return of "colored"

[Laurence Horn]

On Mar 30, 2012, at 10:04 AM, Amy West wrote:

> On 3/30/12 12:00 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
>> And "colored people" is different from "colored boy", where "boy" may
>> be more demeaning than "colored" -- certainly when applied to adults.
>>
>> Joel
>
> Right: for me "colored" is marked because I saw it in the context of the
> Civil Rights movement as a child and often saw it in
> discriminatory/segregated situations.

Two factors in its rehabilitation (if there has actually been one) may be the disappearance of those "Colored" water-fountains, waiting rooms, and such, combined with the enduring popularity of Ntozake Shange's _For Colored Girls (Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow in Enuf)_ and its various revivals adaptations.  Just speculation on my part, of course.

LH

> I realize that for my Alabama
> grandmother and for my Bostonian mother they both may have  used it as a
> neutral term simply because that was the term used back then. (I
> actually suspect that it was not as neutral for them as I like to think.)
>
> --
> ---Amy West
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org