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"Weren't those laws only really enforced when coloured people broke them, though?"

What? 'Coloured' people also refers to a very specific subset of South Africans It doesn't mean what you think it does here.

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You're right--I've revised to convey my meaning correctly. Thanks for the correction!

Can you elaborate? When I visited South Africa, a few white people used it to refer to the non-whites. I do not know if they were just trying to be descriptive or discriminatory. Perhaps it didn't mean what I thought it meant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured is fairly accurate.

"Coloured" refers to (and is used self-descriptively by) a subset of people of mixed race of generally one or more of usually British and Dutch ancestry on the "White" side, and generally one or more of various Bantu groups (mostly Xhosa, Zulu, some Ndebele, &c.) or Khoisan ancestry, and sometimes also of Malaysian or other South-East Asian ancestry (from ex-Dutch colonies).

A more descriptive, if not less offensive, term would be half-caste. Half-caste means the same thing everywhere in the world.

I am one.

I would get scowled at using that term when I first moved out of SA. It is referring to a specific group of people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Coloureds

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