Ethnonyms of African Americans

Americans with sub-Saharan African ancestry

skin color-based classification of people with origins in the tropical climate zone of Africa and Melanesia

In the English language, the term negro is a term historically used to refer to people of Black African heritage. The term negro means the color black in Spanish and Portuguese (from Latin niger), where English took it from. The term can be viewed as offensive, inoffensive, or completely neutral, largely depending on the region or country where it is used, as well as the time period and context in which it is applied. It has various equivalents in other languages of Europe.

Nigger is a racial slur directed at Black people. References to nigger have been increasingly replaced by the euphemistic , notably in cases where nigger is mentioned but not directly used. In an instance of linguistic reappropriation, the term nigger is also used casually and fraternally among African Americans, most commonly in the form of nigga, whose spelling reflects the phonology of African-American English.

Nigga (), also known as "the N-word", is a colloquial term in African-American Vernacular English that is considered as vulgar in most contexts of its use. It began as a dialect form of the word nigger, an ethnic slur against black people. As a result of reappropriation, today the word is used mostly by African-Americans in a largely non-pejorative sense as a slang term referring to another person or to themselves, often in a neutral or friendly way. The word is commonly associated and prevalent with hip hop culture, especially that of gangsta rap, G-funk, and the broader West Coast hip hop. T

thumb|upright=1.5|Photograph by Russell Lee (photographer)|Russell Lee showing historical use of the term in the US in contrast with "white". Besides the big signs, the water cooler itself is labelled with a sign reading "colored". Colored (or coloured) is a racial descriptor historically used in the United States during the Jim Crow era to refer to an African American. In many places, it may be considered a slur.