AIBU or is it not acceptable these days...

[Pickles89]

to refer to black people as 'The Blacks'?

I've just had a massive row with my parents. My mum was enthusing over a film they watched last night, and saying how positive it was that The Blacks were well represented, with A Black as one of the main characters. Not, 'black people' or 'a black person' but The Blacks. It made me feel tense and uncomfortable and I pointed out that it's not 'done' to talk like that in this day and age. She turned round and gave me a bollocking saying that it's the meaning behind terms you use that's important, and how you treat people, not how you refer to them, and that she and the rest of her white, middle-class generation (her words) won't be 'corrected' by their children.

Now she's not talking to me. Wonderful. The thing is it made me uncomfortable, and I could imagine using such language might not go down too well in wider society either. It's true that she wasn't saying anything derogatory about black people, quite the opposite, but I still felt I should made her aware. AIBU, or am I being oversensitive and officiously 'PC'?

Shit to refer BAME. Absolutely rubbish suggestion.
I do not want to loose my ethnicity due to being forcibly lumped in one group to make political planning easier.

Black is fine to say. BAME/BME is usually used more formally in reports, stats etc. referring to sectors of society/people who aren't white.

Blacks and whites as plural are still used sometimes in some of the academic writing I've read. 'The Blacks' would have made me feel uncomfortable too though. I'm mixed race by the way.

Nobody serious could use bamer in normal conversation surely?

I also heard 'coloured' from a 45year old HR woman about a new employee not long ago. The horror on my face actually made her go bright red & flustered, so she knew it was wrong

When I was a child, "coloured" was the more polite thing to say. It was considered rude to refer to someone as a "black woman" or " black child".

I'm 64.

There are also cases where non-white people grew up, also using particular terms which are now considered racist.

I used to have a black team leader (in the early-mid 2000s, she was in her early 40s) who referred to herself and other black people as 'coloured'. I remember, not long after I'd started, she told me I needed to take something to another floor to give it to 'Barbara' (let's call her). I didn't know who Barbara was, so I asked what she looked like and where she sat. My TL instantly said "She's on the end row nearest the car park, she's the only coloured one on the floor". I was really, really shocked that she used that word. Should I have said something, though? Challenged her? Told her off for being racist against black people?! There was no malice or agenda in her words - it was just an obvious characteristic to inoffensively use to point her out, but using (as I believed) a very offensive word.