From Minority to AALANA, What’s in a Name?: About three years ago, I stopped referring to people of African, Latino, Asian, and Native American descent as minorities.I dropped the word “minority” from my spoken vocabulary for some of the same reasons many African-Americans buried Negro in the 1960s and instead started calling themselves Black or Afro-American. (Ironically, more than 50,000 people wrote into the 2000 U.S. Census that they were Negroes.)
I think the number one reason why people use the term minorities is that it is easier and more concise for academics and reporters to say and write minorities than African-Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. It is one word as opposed to eight, and most people know whom they mean when they say it.
