This just goes to show how pointless it is to try to categorise people based on superficial physical features. Some of my English ancestors are unusually dark coloured for English people, and I mean dark coloured to the point that they’ve been mistaken for Persians. I think this all goes to show that racial categorisation is inherently problematic. We quibble, for example, over the nuances of terms such as white, Hispanic, Latino, and Puerto Rican, but we are happy to use the term “black” to encompass people whose ancestors come from almost all of Africa. Unsurprisingly, many “black” people don’t even consider themselves to be black. I understand that Somalis, for example, do not consider themselves to be black and sometimes even use the term as a pejorative way of describing other Africans. I guess the only real use of this data is to get a fairly crude sense of how different groups are affected by poverty, represented among the prison population, access healthcare, etc.
You have to be careful with Canada. Approximately half the Catholic population in Canada is concentrated in Quebec, and the vast majority of those are not of Anglo-Saxon descent.
I do not think of “black” as offensive, and I don’t know of any blacks who do either. It’s a perfectly respectable, shorthand way of referring to the African race, just as “white” refers to the European race.
It’s fine if they use it themselves. As for white people using it to describe them, if you are white, please visit Washington DC, Baltimore, or Philadelphia and start talking about “black people” or “blacks” and report back what happens.
Truer words were never spoken. I lived there for almost a decade. The place is amazingly diverse. Name any cuisine and you can find someplace that prepares and serves it well. Raouche in Merrifield serves great Lebanese.