Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 July 25

= July 25 =

Politically correct synonym of "mulatto"?
Is there a politically correct term that has a similar meaning to the word mulatto (i.e., a person with mixed white and Black ancestry)? That word is sometimes considered offensive so I'd like a replacement. I'm not looking for something generic like "mixed-race", "biracial", etc., because those could be used with any combination of races. There are non-offensive terms for other combinations (e.g., Blasian for Black+Asian, hapa for white+Asian/Pacific Islander), so what about for Black+white? 98.170.164.88 (talk) 05:01, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
 * If you think that's bad, you could use what Limbaugh used to describe Obama: "Halfrican". <-Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots-> 06:55, 25 July 2022 (UTC)


 * The politically correct term is human. Our article on race says "there is a broad scientific agreement that essentialist and typological conceptions of race are untenable". HiLo48 (talk) 07:03, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
 * That is an admirable attitude, but it does not address what the OP asked. --←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 08:01, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Indeed. As long as there is a human perception of race also with relevant consequences and someone wants to address them, the statement "there are no races" doesn't help at all. --KnightMove (talk) 08:08, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
 * But there isn't a "human" perception of race in the form the OP asked. There is just an American one. HiLo48 (talk) 09:56, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes, but if you insist that race doesn't exist, it does have the "advantage" of allowing you to ignore (and thus have no responsibility for ameliorating) any of the real harm done to people because of their race. It's a very convenient attitude to have as it absolves one of any responsibility for fixing any of the world's problems around the topic, and returns such responsibility only on the people so harmed, not on the people who are advantaged because of that harm.  -- Jayron 32 12:56, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Describing that harm as being something to do with race ONLY happens in places where it's considered normal to give everyone an official racial label. That is not the whole world. In the modern world, it's mostly the USA. HiLo48 (talk) 22:27, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Closer to home, indigenous Australians who come to public notice are routinely described as aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. Wikipedia has various lists of prominent indigenous Australians. I take your point that race is a social construct with no scientific basis, but social constructs have a major impact on how societies proceed and evolve, and it's not useful to pretend they don't exist. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:47, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
 * The Aboriginal and TSI thing is a self-identification, and is not officially described as a racial label. HiLo48 (talk) 02:33, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I think that's very disingenuous, particularly coming from a former teacher. I don't need to remind you of the endless ways ATSI people have been historically mistreated. That had nothing to do with their "self-identification", and everything to do with the perception of the white invaders that they were of a different, and inferior, race, who were not entitled to the same level of respect as white people were. The very concept of race is cemented into our Constitution, at s.51(xxvi): The Parliament shall ... have power to make laws ... with respect to ... The people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws. The struck-out clause was removed in 1967, not because it was considered the aboriginal people were of the same race as other Australians, but because it was considered discriminatory. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  02:51, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
 * What you say was certainly true in the past. I am writing in the present tense. HiLo48 (talk) 03:12, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
 * The things that happened in the past continue to affect the present tense, and where a person fits in present current society, is affected by the past. The social and economic position a person is in is strongly controlled by that which their parents were in, and they were so similarly affected by their parent's position, and so on.  The harm that was done by racism didn't magically get fixed when a law got changed.  -- Jayron 32 11:03, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Just want to make it clear that I did not come here to promote racial essentialism or anything of the kind. It seems to me that even if racial/ethnic classifications are somewhat fuzzy or arbitrary, it can still be useful to have words to talk about them. (And such classifications have very real consequences, as KnightMove said, whether you want them to or not.) 98.170.164.88 (talk) 19:58, 25 July 2022 (UTC)


 * 98.170.164.88 -- In the United States, the One Drop Rule traditionally meant that children of a white parent and a black parent were considered "black". The traditional system in New Orleans was a bit more complicated, due to lingering non-U.S. influences... AnonMoos (talk) 07:38, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
 * To avoid confusion for anyone not following that link, it should be made clear that the USA's 20th-century "one drop" laws did not stop at 'half-and-half, but went considerably beyond, perhaps as far as one-sixteenth ('hexadecaroon') as the article Quadroon mentions. See also Passing (racial identity). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.201.73.20 (talk) 16:17, 28 July 2022 (UTC)


 * In the UK, the term "mixed heritage" is preferred, while Wikipedia has multiracial people. Alansplodge (talk) 10:38, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Attempting to answer the OP's specific question for the view from England only: Mixed (United Kingdom ethnicity category) states that the 2001 and 2011 English censuses used "Mixed White and Black Caribbean", "Mixed White and Asian", "Mixed White and Black African", and "Other Mixed" as categories for people to choose should they wish. Two of those would seem to satisfy the OP's request. Bazza (talk) 10:46, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

As long as the topic itself is considered sensitive by some people, there will always be someone who's going to be offended by any euphemism you come up with. So the answer to the original question is, no, there isn't and there can't be. — Kpalion(talk) 14:41, 25 July 2022 (UTC)


 * The answer to the original question is, yes, there is. The OP did not ask for a euphemism, but a replacement for a word which they consider sometimes offensive. My comment just above gives two official options, for England at least. Bazza (talk) 16:13, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
 * The OP's description of Hapa is incorrect. In Hawaii, it refers to any mixed race person, not just white-Asian/Pacific islander. Also, many people consider the term to be "vulgar and racist". Cullen328 (talk) 16:23, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Oh, I was going by what Wiktionary said about the word (and it did not mention the negative perception). Noted. 98.170.164.88 (talk) 19:55, 25 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Looking at the etymologies of terms like "mulatto" and "mestizo", it's easy to see why they'd be considered offensive. "Mixed race" + whichever groups would seem to be less so. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:52, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
 * How about mixed ancestry, rather than mixed race? I think we can all agree that ancestry is real, whereas race is obviously doubtful, AND, at a minimum, provocative. HiLo48 (talk) 22:31, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
 * In Europe, at least, "ethnicity" is generally preferred, which carries more cultural undertones. I guess there is a bigger possibility to self-claim ethnicity, as long as you learn the language and the cultural behavior involved, where as "race" is seen more as a fixed constant. (Although in the American film Jungle Fever there's this conversation about skin color, which includes this cultural/ ethnic conversation about blackness.)

-"Aren't Drew and Vera mulattoes? Their skin is lighter than mine." ... -"At least in my eyes, Drew and Ming are black. They look black, act black, so they are black!"
 * 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 11:50, 26 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Baseball_Bugs -- In Spain's Western Hemisphere empire, the three basic groups were Europeans, Indians, and Blacks, and the three basic mixed groups were Mulattos (offspring of European and Black parents), Mestizos (offspring of European and Indian parents), and Zambos (offspring of Indian and Black parents). Then there were many further theoretical sub-niches (see commons:category:Casta paintings for more than you probably want to know).  I don't think that "mestizo" is generally an insulting term in Spanish, since large numbers of inhabitants of many Latin American countries are mestizo or consider themselves mestizo.  In Spanish-speaking countries, what is known in English as "Columbus Day" is usually called "Dia de la Raza" (sorry for missing diacritic), and is basically a celebration of being mestizo... AnonMoos (talk) 17:30, 25 July 2022 (UTC)


 * I recall the term melano being used similarly. Maybe a pretty rare term, however. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 01:25, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
 * , I doubt that you meant to link to an article about a former Italian speaking town in southern Switzerland. Cullen328 (talk) 03:14, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
 * It looks like a pretty nice town at least. More to the point, I couldn't find any uses of this. The Greek word that this comes from just means "black" with no indication of mixing, so I'm a little skeptical it has this meaning anyway. But if you can find any attestations I'd be interested (but probably wouldn't use it). 98.170.164.88 (talk) 06:48, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I remember that a "melano" girl proposed the term as a better synonym, although it might have failed to spread that much. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 11:50, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
 * IP, I don't know what the correct designation is. But, make darn sure you don't use the wrong ones. GoodDay (talk) 03:04, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I promise to be careful. So far I haven't found anything that is both PC and more satisfying than writing out something like "Mixed White and Black". It's unfortunately a bit verbose but that's a worthwhile tradeoff.
 * The other option I thought of (but dismissed) was to use "lightskin(ned)", which seems to be common these days and socially acceptable. The obvious problem is that the word refers to skin color and not ancestry. It is likely that there's some overlap, but the Venn diagram is far from perfect, e.g. it's perfectly possible for a mixed-race person to have dark skin, or conversely for a Black person to have a light skin tone for other reasons than recent white ancestry.
 * I guess this is just a gap in the vocabulary waiting to be filled. 98.170.164.88 (talk) 06:58, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
 * That's probably not a direction to go in. Bazza (talk) 07:57, 26 July 2022 (UTC)


 * 98.170.164.88 -- In Brazil and on some Caribbean islands, they have whole vocabularies describing varying skin tones (such as "High yellow'" etc. etc.), but many of these terms might become offensive outside their original cultural contexts. In the United States, there is no accidental gap or "sniglet", since a child of a black parent and a white parent has usually been considered to be black... AnonMoos (talk) 09:29, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Cue Thomas Jefferson, with some of his guests in Monticello noticing that some of the "black" children working as servants had Jefferson's own skin colour and hair (and some later passed as white). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 23:51, 27 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Honestly, it is great to find a non-hysterical talk about this topic. My five cents: as far as I know (my source is german-new-left writer Hans Christoph Buch), the ruling elite in Haiti defines itself as white, using the "a drop of (white) blood"-rule. I actually think this is quiet brilliant. The "Negro-problem" in the West would vanish overnight.--Ralfdetlef (talk) 05:03, 28 July 2022 (UTC)