Would the term "brown people" be offensive to you?

I had a student from Haiti. When writing an email, someone called him African-American and his father corrected it. Not all people considered black are African-American. I guess maybe brown might fall into that realm. Not all brown people are Hispanic or even from either American continent.

Did he ask you to refer to them as Haitian/American?  My daughter just asked me what terminology is used in Europe for European born black people.  Do people in England refer to UK-born black people African/English,  do people in Italy call Italian-born black people African/Italian or is this primarily an American term?  I use the term African American, I don't normally use the word black for African Americans but I had no idea what is PC in Europe!  

We don't use "brown" but it doesn't offend me.  We will use Mexican/American or Mexican National, Salvadoran, Guatamalan or whatever.  My husband is Mexican American and so are my kids. They refer to themselves as Mexican. Heck, my (very white skinned) daughter received quite a large Diversity Scholarship for school next year.  Her essay was on skin color.  She is very light skinned, her sister is very dark.  It's actually harder on my light-skinned daughter, people don't assume she's Mexican and she hears all the ugly comments that are usually filtered around my darker girl.
 


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I know for Public Health purposes we use black for people not in the US, and black or African American both in the US. The importance is that it is consistent throughout your research, so you would not say black in one paragraph and AA in another in the same writing. 

I was watching CNN while baking this morning and I heard a commentator (interviewing a Latina) use the phrase "brown people, if you will..." My head flipped around and my first reaction was WTF did he just say? The commentator was African American if that makes a difference. 

I have a large group of Pakistani friends. They refer to themselves as "brown"  

You can't pretend race/color doesn't exist. Derogatory comments are bad. Acknowledging that differences exist is just reality.

It needs to be evaluated in context, but I think it is usually offensive as you can see from Ann Coulter's recent statement:

"The real, insidious, un-American reason soccer is undermining America as we know it is because brown people like it"

It sounds like in the context it was used, it was as a substitute for something like "people of color." When it is relevant, such as it was there in pinning down a number of minorities, I don't think it's offensive. Ann Coulter just IS offensive.

When we adopted our son (biracial, black and white), I asked my various black friends what term I was supposed to be using these days for people who looked like them. It was really bothering me because as someone above pointed out, not everyone is from the same national background, and the term African-American can actually be an insult. (For example, my best friend is actually Kenyan.) Every single one of them said "Please just say black. We're tired of all this PC crap."

My son uses flavor names as skin descriptions. He discovered on a trip to Mexico about a year and a half ago that he was the exact color of the homemade chocolate milk he had there. Since then, he describes himself as "chocolate," but with the Spanish pronunciation, lol. Daddy is vanilla, sissy is strawberry, and I am peach with chocolate chips (freckles). He likes that I have the chocolate chips because it makes him feel that he looks a little bit more like me.