Quote Originally Posted by Lampada
Негр в русском - не оскорбительное слово. Это просто перевод с английского слова negro.
Yes,I know that -- which is why I used the translation "black people" in my imaginary scenario of Basil meeting an American girl's parents. But since he used the perfectly polite Russian word негр in parallel with пид@расов, and in a joke about hating racists and blacks, the оскорбительность of пид@расов sort of "bled" into the otherwise normal word негр, in my mind. (It's like when you wash a red shirt with white socks in hot water -- the socks pick up some of the redness).

Although, by the way, it was very strange for me at first to hear the word негр from Russians when I lived in Moscow back in 93-94, and until I became accustomed to негр as the "normal" word, I always wanted to say черные люди -- but my Russian friends soon explained to me that this phrase did NOT mean "people of African origin"!

The problem with негр is not that it sounds phonetically like "n*gger", which is only true in the именительном падеже, единственном числе, but that it reminded me of "Negro" -- which was the polite term in America when my parents were kids, but was already old-fashioned by the time I was born in 1971. I grew up saying "blacks" or "black people," and then in the late '80s, "African-American" started to become fashionable.