The color names traditionally assigned to the various peoples and races of the world are notoriously inexact. Most white people’s skin is not truly white, nor is most black people’s skin black, to say nothing of the inexactitude of red and yellow. Of the familiar color labels, only brown has much claim to objective accuracy, though it is so broad a term that it can be used of virtually any skin of any group except untanned northern Europeans.
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Of course the standard color terms are not really used as objective descriptions of skin tones—that is left to a more expressive vocabulary containing such words as bronze, copper-colored, milky, and ebony.White, black, red, and yellow serve rather as shorthand racial labels, and in this usage they have met with varying fates in American English. While white and black are used at all levels with complete naturalness, red and yellow are now rarely encountered and in most contexts are looked on as offensive
