@thor It's crazy how as a result of the term black being gradually adopted as "correct" in the US instead of other older terms, it brought into the dynamic all kinds of negative associations built into the English language with the word black.

It's not surprising that when Britain was all Nordic peoples, much like Norway, there were negative associations with the word black because of how early peoples are afraid of the dark (rightly so) and actual blackness (not browner skin tones obviously) gets connected with less pleasant things in nature, like being burnt, getting dirty, mold, rot...

Of course in some cultures black has the positive associations, like in China and some other cultures, where black represents strength and white is death. That's actually pretty common, and it also seems likely that the Chinese cultivated that thinking because they had ink writing on paper so early.

When you're writing black on white, it's easy to see the black as the living, strong good part and the white as the dead, inert, empty part.

But either way, the choice to embrace calling humans black and white was clearly a bad one from the start. Black and white have such embedded cultural associations in English with bad and good that can't simply be shaken: blackballed, blacklisted, pure as snow, white night, black heart, the list goes on and on.

I really don't know how we can solve that, and it would be amazing if Norwegians could skip that whole mistake to begin with.