On Tue, 2020-07-21 at 18:25 -0700, Loren Wilton wrote: > I do strongly wonder whether this is "society" or only "people in the > USA". It should be noted that historically bkacks were enslaved just > as little or much as any other race in other countries, and I don't > see those contries bending over to appease blacks because the Romans > and Greeks would enslave them (as well as anyone else). > >From my POV (I'm from NZ, resident in the UK) I think the racial use of 'black' in everyday speech is pretty much limited to the USA and South Africa.
When I was resident in NZ we always referred to the major resident groups as pakeha (the Maori word for white-skins), Maori (or possibly a person's tribe if you know it and are on a marae) and everybody else by ancestral nationality: e.g. there is a fair size Chinese population dating largely from the Gold Rush. Britain is much the same as NZ apart from distinguishing between English, Northern Irish, Scots and Welsh and using the generic 'Caribbean' rather than the specific - Jamaican, Barbadian, etc. which is to opposite to people from Africa: calling anybody an 'African' is rare: specific nationalities are almost invariably used just as they are for the rest of the world. The main generic term yo hear for non- europeans is 'people of colour', which still seems rather long and stilted to me. 'Russian', Soviet' or (not so much) 'Communist' used to be generics for residents of the USSR, but now those terms have vanished and been replaced by the use of specific nationalities. I don't think there are more than a handful of genuine communists left anywhere in what used to be the Soviet Union. In general the so-called hard right here would appear to align more with the Democrats in the USA, so to me a recent comment describing Obama as a hard-left radical seems ridiculous: he's no more a leftie than former UK Prime Ministers Tony Blair (Labour), David Cameron (Conservative) or Jacinda Ardern (NZ Prime Minister) are. Martin
