"of African descent and similar expressions seem routine but, to me, it seems to imply a movement that is downward in more than the genetic sense."

For crying out loud. Are we all to be so worried about offending someone that we'll be struck dumb? Because I say you were descended from cave-dwelling Picts doesn't mean you are inferior to them, Rowan. I'm sure your cave is much more comfy.

You're probably right about my particular cave LEJ, but our different appreciations of the language implications in "descent" may be attributable to differences of experience, context (social, national or disciplinary) or basic attitude; in your case I'm sure it's not our basic attitudes that are different.

Australia, which is my context, is multicultural in that we have people from almost every country around the globe; all of us except those with only Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander ancestry are the descendants of immigrants and the earliest of these immigrants (the colonising group) came from a social context that put the meanest and lowliest of them "above" the indigenous locals. The racism behind such social barriers are very well described (although in an Indian setting) in EM Forster's "A passage to India", where it was clearly understood that the highest indigenous stratum was "subordinate" to every member of the colonising group.

In this, Australian indigenes share a similar status with indigenous Indians in India and 'The first nations' of both Canada and the US, and for the same reasons; they were colonised peoples. Australian indigenes may share their skin colour with both African American "Blacks" and many immigrants in Britain who've come from countries that Britain colonised, especially those whose ancestors were enslaved. But even though the "slavery" of the Australian indigenes has never been formally recognised as such, unlike that of those with African ancestry, they are still demeaned socially. I'm not in the US so I can only observe from a distance but I get the impression that the resentments of African Americans, while rooted in dispossession, that dispossession was a result of the slavery of their ancestors rather than the dispossession purely as a result of being colonised. But the demeaning of all these groups has the same causes and effects.

Some of the demeaning has been institutional; while the art of "white" people has routinely been collected and displayed in national galleries, the art of Aboriginal and other coloured peoples has routinely been (until quite recently) displayed in museums of natural history. If museums have collections of skeletal materials, almost always the collection is mostly from "coloured" peoples rather than from "white peoples"; Spitalfields is a rare exception and the British Museum has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to even consider the return of Aboriginal remains (quite literally) "stolen" by "white" people.

In most "Western" societies "whiteness is "us" and "Black" or "coloured" is "them" and "other" and definitely "not us"; "we" do the studying and curation and paternalism of "them". Because "they" are "less than us". You may have guessed by now that I have particular sensitivities because of my context and I may as well let on that, by profession I have many dealings with Australian Aborigines; at both personal and professional levels I try to be sensitive to their perceptions and understandings.

A colloquial term of approval for a good bloke, common in Oz and probably elsewhere, "He's a white man!" It has even been used, in the past, as a term of approval for people in Oz who are coloured. Its qualitative modifier is "He's a real white man!"

I cringe at the racism behind such an apparently innocent statement and wouldn't dream of uttering it or any of the phrases associating blackness with "bad" or "evil". But I may be a wimp. [Having a left handed daughter I even wince at the casual use of "dextrous", "sinister" and "kack-handed", so I must be a wimp.] While I've acknowledged my ancestry I can't say that I have any particular pride in it; I may as well be proud of my eye colour or my height or any other attribute over which I've had no control. Garbage!

I don't expect you to share my senstivities, because it's likely you come from quite different contexts and have other strengths, but I would ask you not to dismiss them or demean them until you can demonstrate their inadequacies.

You might be correct in your attribution of "Pictish" to my ancestry, but it's too far back for me to discern; the "Rowan" came out of the blue, before my mother knew her own ancestry.

Cheers, Rowan