Some of you may not know, but I graduated from what I would call a predominantly "African American" high school. Back then we would have called it a "Black" school without meaning any disrespect. I point that out because I personally do not remember any racial tensions while I attended the school. I was treated in a manner that I think everyone was treated, although I might be naive to the facts. So, I heard many words that were used to describe various colors of skin. I heard "cracker", "honky", and "redneck" to describe my color of skin. I never felt they were used toward me in a derogatory manner, however. I also heard "blue" used to describe one of our darkest players on the baseball team. I heard "high yellow", "mixed", and "redbone" to describe some light colored African Americans. I personally never used these terms because I was unsure it they were derogatory. I tell you this because I thought I had heard every word out there that can be used to describe a person's skin or the source of a person's skin color.
So while in graduate school, I was shocked when a term was used that I had never heard of. A girl that I shared an office with told me that a friend of hers was stopping by. She then proceeded to say she was mulatto. I am not sure why she told me this (maybe she thought I would be shocked or something), but I had no clue what that meant. I asked her and she proceeded to tell me that it meant that she had one white parent and one black parent. To me this was an odd word and to this day I don't know if it is disrespectful and do not use the word. I went home that night and told SuperMom, before she was officially SuperMom, "I met a girl today that was magenta". She looked at me oddly and said "I don't think she was magenta". I replied "yeah, she has one white and one black parent". SuperMom laughed and replied "she isn't light purple. I think you mean mulatto". I conceded that maybe she was right and never tried to flex my extensive vocabulary again.
For all the people that know me, I don't think I need to say this, but for some of you that don't I will. I mean absolutely no disrespect by any of the words I used in this blog. I only used them to tell you the ones that I heard while in school from friends of mine that were primarily African American.