QUOTE: Tangent: JB's Ororo was the best character in his X-MEN run. (And then she was utterly ruined.)

It just occurred to me, that "Black Storm" sounds kinda neat.  I suspect that the "Black" moniker was used so much, not out of any kind of foul intent,  because just because it jazzes up names that might otherwise not be so memorable.  Just look at how many non-black characters have the word "Black" in their names. It's quite a lot.

Even though the term "African American" has been around for a while, I still tend to use "Black", it's the word I grew up with.  My 80 year-old father uses "Colored", I guess it's the word he grew up with.

I used to be married to a woman who had one set of grandparents that came from Turkey.  I often teased her about being half-Asian.  She insisted she wasn't.  I told her, "Sure you are, look at a map".

About a year or two ago, I asked my father if we were "American-Jews" or "Jewish-Americans".  He thought about it for a moment and said, "We're American before anything else".  Honestly, I was surprised to get such a clear-cut answer from The Old Man, especially with the question worded as it was.

There was an H.P. Lovecraft story in which there was a cat named "Nigger-Man" although Lovecraft was racist (if I'm not mistaken).  Still, even in America the word was not always used with offensive intent, as evidenced in the works of Mark Twain.  I also read once (forget the name of the book) that the word 'negro' was once pronounced 'negger' and indeed the etymology, as it says in the dictionary is: from Latin nigr-, niger."

I remember reading a story about Canadian singer Fefe Dobson being called African-American and scratching my head. I guess she was born in NORTH America, so it almost makes sense.

One of my good friends is from Barbados and is referred to as African-American all the time. He bites his tongue, but told me he wants to scream "I'm BARBADIAN!"