How Did Negro and Colored Become Bad Words?

I see this is sort of discussed a tad on forums I am going too. IS it ok to say NEGRO again I am seeing? You know the whole Henry Reid thing. Why do we sort of react in a bad to the word NEGRO when both blacks and whites used it not so many decades ago. It is interesting to see how language evolves in such a short time

A few years ago some friends and I rented a house in Jamaica. I wanted to get out and wanted to see the locals. This was a fairly rural location. It started to rain so I popped into a local police station.

Some very nice guys. However I was taken aback. They kept asking me how many "Colored" police and "Colored" Lawyers there were in my town. To my ears this was sort of shocking because well one does not really use that term anymore .

Negro was once often a fairly non offense word. I mean all it is the word black in another language.

In fact one major African American organization still uses it in its title. So can we use NEGRO now in everyday conversation? Well not really .

I think the word got offensive because well many adapted the word "Negro" to the very offensive huge N word. Which even when I heard it at a very young age seemed to be mean.

Further there are some old southerners (maybe in the north too but I think this was a Southern thing) still with us that use the term NIGRA which a black person told me they just saw as a compromise as to NEGRO and the N word and my gosh he was no compromise. I could see his point. I am not sure that what the white folks intentions when it started (Maybe it was) but well again I could see his point.

So in effect culture and slang in a sense put the word the word NEGRO out to pasture.

I am not sure how "colored" became bad. I actually think the word "Colored" is much physically descriptive and sounds much more nicer and sort of exotic than the word "black". "Colored" also seems to be proper because it many cases it acknowledges in many cases the diversity of African Americans. SEE OBAMA.

However for whatever reason colored went out the window. I am pretty sure I know why NEGRO went out but I was never clear on why colored did . Perhaps it was a POLITICAL THING. Obama is not half white he is black!! It was important so African Americans could form together for impoortant social and political needs.

In the end the light skinned Plessy of Plessy V Fergurson still got arrested and it would not matter if he he was colored , or light skin or black as coal. In the end it did not matter that Homer Plessy's paternal grandfather was Germain Plessy, a white Frenchman born in Bordeaux. circa 1777. So that might be it.

How this color wheel classification that was started by whites used in the centuries after to keep people down was so adopted by african americans I don't know. It is sort of sad.

In some ways we have not moved passed the old one drop rule and all that means.