The terms “black” and “negro” (the latter traceable to the earliest slave traders, who were Spanish and Portuguese) were widely disparaged because the slavemasters had preferred them, and also because their literal meaning excluded hundreds of thousands of mulattoes, whose color was not black. “Colored” was thought to be more inclusively accurate, but among other drawbacks it failed to distinguish the former slaves from Orientals and Indians. Moreover, the term “colored” implied that whites were not colored, or that coloring was a property added somehow to basic human qualities.
