Colored, or coloured, is an ethnic descriptor historically used in the United States and other European-settled countries and their former colonies. In many of these places, it is now considered an ethnic slur. Historically, the term denoted non-"white" individuals generally. The term has historically had a variety of connotations. In British usage, the term refers to "a person who is wholly or partly of non-white descent" and its use may be regarded as antiquated or offensive, and other terms are preferable, particularly when referring to a single ethnicity. In the West Indies the term "coloured" originally had more complex class and political meaning, specifically used to denote a person with some or all Black African ancestry but also of the same class as white or having certain similar privileges. Such a person might have been free or worked in collaboration with the system of slavery. Coloureds formed socially distinct class different from the majority of the subjugated population. In the American South, use of the term "colored" gradually came to be restricted to "negroes". Following the Civil Rights Movement, "colored" and "negro" gave way to "black" and "African American" or "Afro-American" as a push-back against the divisive colorism within the various communities. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the wordcolored was first used in the 14th century, but with a meaning other than race or ethnicity. In South Africa and neighbouring countries, the term coloureds describes a multiracial ethnic group native to Southern Africa who have ancestry from more than one of the various populations inhabiting the region, including Khoisan, Bantu, Afrikaner, Whites, Austronesian, East Asian or South Asian. Under Apartheid, South Africa broadly classified its population into four races, namely Blacks, Whites, Coloureds and Indians.
In 1851, an article in The New York Times referred to the "colored population". In 1863, the War Department established the Bureau of Colored Troops. The first 12 United States Census counts enumerated '"colored" people, who totaled nine million in 1900. The census counts of 1910–1960 enumerated "negroes". NPR reported that the "use of the phrase "colored people" peaked in books published in 1970." "It's no disgrace to be colored," the black entertainer Bert Williams famously observed early in the century, "but it is awfully inconvenient." "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 segregatedWest Virginia in the 1960s. "Welcome to the Colored Zone, a large stretched banner could have said.... Of course, the colored world was not so much a neighborhood as a condition of existence." "For most of my childhood, we couldn't eat in restaurants or sleep in hotels, we couldn't use certain bathrooms or try on clothes in stores", recalls Gates. His mother retaliated by not buying clothes that she was not allowed to try on. He remembered hearing a white man deliberately calling his father by the wrong name: "'He knows my name, boy,' my father said after a long pause. 'He calls all colored people George.'" When Gates's cousin became the first black cheerleader at the local high school, she was not allowed to sit with the team and drink Coke from a glass, but had to stand at the counter drinking from a paper cup. Professor Gates also wrote about his experiences in his 1995 book, Colored People: A Memoir. In the 21st century, "colored" is generally regarded as an offensive term, due to the fact that signs under Jim Crow depicted the term "colored". The term lives on in the name of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, generally called the NAACP. In 2008, its communications director Carla Sims said "the term 'colored' is not derogatory, chose the word 'colored' because it was the most positive description commonly used . It's outdated and antiquated but not offensive."
