OP here. I ran into an interesting situation doing demographics for a college: there were 586 blacks and 587 African Americans: one white guy from South Africa

OP here. I ran into an interesting situation doing demographics for a college: there were 586 blacks and 587 African Americans: one white guy from South Africa worked the system. Needless to say, no one got kicked off a bus because their parents were born in Africa. They got kicked off a bus for being black. Since then, it has been my, perhaps selective, observation that the trend is for groups to prefer we recognize the people for what they've been through. They're not homosexual, they're gay. They're not African American, they're black. That said, in this case, I honestly hadn't considered the possibility that "chinaman" was offensive, but between "chinaman" and "chinese man", "chinaman" felt right in the story.