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UCLA law prof Eugene Volokh spends some serious time with the question of “whether people have some sort of good-manners obligation to abandon ‘disabled’ for ‘handicapped,’ ‘American Indian’ for ‘Native American,’ ‘black’ for ‘African American,’ and so on. I think the answer is generally no, unless the old term is so commonly used as a pejorative that listeners can reasonably infer that your use of it is pejorative, or possibly if the old term is so rarely used and thus archaic that listeners can reasonably wonder ‘what does he mean by that?’ when they hear it (e.g., ‘Negro’ or ‘Hebrew’ as a noun to refer to Jews). The mere fact that some members of a group, or even a majority of the members of a group, prefer the new term doesn’t impose on us an obligation to use the new term.”
“Meanwhile, the majority can convince African-Americans that they’ve won some kind of important concession by persuading polite, civil Americans to adopt this term.
