A lot of this bothers me, but I can't put my finger on exactly why I'm bothered. In the 60s, I hung out with a lot of blues musicians who didn't differentiate between "Nigger", "Negro", "Black", "Colored", or "Whitey", "Honky" and a number of other colorful terms during a typical conversation.

They used all these terms to add nuance to their speech and it didn't seem to bother anyone present as I recall, perhaps because the terms were being used with both sarcasm AND affection by both races. If anything, it drew me closer to the problems that Negros faced in the 60s and helped me realize the vast chasm that separated our two cultures. Music seemed to be a bridge that spanned them.

I'm not sure the homoginization of all these terms into "African-American" is necessarily a good thing. It eliminates the wonderful nuances that even African-Americans used to describe themselves in the past, just as a "dumb redneck" or "trailer trash" creates certain instant mental images today.

Is it painting with "too broad a brush"? Perhaps, but simply placing everybody into a category that can be described with a hyphenated two word description is possibly not the answer either.

I guess the problem arises when hate groups get hold of a term and use it in a derogatory sense to incite others. At 62, I still don't have many answers, just more and more questions.