AIBU To wonder why and on what basis we attribute colour

Interesting point. I always wondered why people kept banging on about Obama being 'black', when he was of mixed race, having a white Mother. Keeping away from the race card, why is the black part of his heritage more important than his white part? Or is that just the US right wing press who are so bothered about it? And yes, I remember the old John Wayne cowboy films with 'red indians'.

humptydumpty but if we didn't have to make reference to the skin colour of African derived individuals why should it matter. We wouldn't call an individual who was three quarters white and one quarter Chinese...Yellow would we? I don't think they would expect to be called this either.

Not if anyone saw photos of her before she straightened her hair.

All credit from me to Meghan Markle for acknowledging this - it would have been easy to 'pretend' to be white in terms of marrying into the royal family and she could easily have done that, given how light her skin is.

Surely she is 'a woman of colour' if she is (at least) 1/4 black? I say 'at least', only because I don't know her mother's racial constituency...

I think my thoughts must have drifted this way by the constant talk of Meghan Markle being a woman of colour, which I find odd as her father is 'white' and I think her mother is also half caste so effectively (and if true) Meghan is three quarters white so why call her black or a woman of colour?

My niece is Asian and she refers to herself as black.

I believe the term 'black' was adopted by African-Americans themselves in the 60s (?) around the time of the Black Power protests at the Olympics, previously having been 'coloured'.

I know it sounds daft but this morning I was thinking when I was a child I lived in a mining village in the 1950s early 60 there was one black family yet we never referred to their colour they were just part of the community. When I married I moved to a mill town where again colour was not really mentioned their place of origin was used to identify them I.e. West Indians, Indians or Pakistanis.
Why do we need to identify a person by their skin colour ie. Black British and if we need to then are we discriminating against Yellow, Beige and Red British by not identifying their colour?

Grannyactivist is correct there have always been various colours used as description of people's ethnicity
Asians and mixed race are often called brown and in WI (Trinidad) light skinned blacks are called High Black and mixed race High red, and yes Chinese were referred to as Yellow although I ve not heard that term for a good while
Aborigines were called Blackfellow which is now considered politically incorrect although still used amongst themselves
And yes Red indians in the cowboy and Indians films so I think all races are covered

Interesting question Joelsnan, but as a child growing up in Manchester Chinese people were referred to as yellow and we watched cowboy films featuring 'red' Indians. This Wiki article about colour terminology may be helpful;
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_terminology_for_race.