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When I worked at the University of Washington's serials collection in Suzzallo Library there was one thing you could learn just by scanning the collection of journals over the past 150 years: The shifting landscape of preferred social grouping names over time. I remember one single journal that did the full Negro --> Colored --> Black --> Afro-American --> African American migration over its long history. Many other racial and ethnic groups have made similar journeys.
As I've long felt, so long as there is derogatory intent in referring to a group, it doesn't matter how often you change the name since the new word will just come to be viewed that way as well.
Yeah, it is amusing that the NAACP would protest colored. But the United Negro College Fund doesn't make that word any more appropriate for general use. It is equally amusing that an adult in a remotely political position wouldn't realize that colored is off limits.
GD: I understand the shorthand of shared experience. I don't understand it being an "identity" that needs to be preserved, protected, rejoiced, worshipped, or otherwise as objectively important. If you hadn't been raised the way you were (say your parents ran away from home and started a peach farm in rural Georgia) would you (and more importantly should you) still identify as East European Jew?
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