I'm not being racist here but to most Filipinos, the word negro or negra (for the females) is still widely used..even the word negrito/negrita..it's a common banter or jokes too to someone (yeah even Filipinos) who has darker skin than the usual..I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it's just common term there. If someone would call out it's foul or racist, lots of Filipinos would be guilty, young and old.
According to Wikipidea:
...The word “Negro” is used in the English-speaking world to refer to a person of black ancestry or appearance. The word negro denotes 'black' in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking vocabulary, or from the ancient Latin, niger, 'black', probably from a Proto-Indo-European root *nekw-, 'to be dark', akin to *nokw- 'night'.
In other languages
In Portuguese, negro is an adjective for the color black, although preto is the most common antonym of branco (white). In Brazil and Portugal, negro is the most respectful way to address people of Black African descent, with preto sometimes being considered politically incorrect or a racial slur.
In Spain, Mexico and almost all of Latin-America, negro (note that ethnonyms, names of nationalities, etc. are generally not capitalized in Romance languages) means "black person" in colloquial situations, but it can be considered to be derogatory in other situations (as in English, "black" is often used to mean irregular or undesirable, as in "black market/mercado negro"). However, in Spanish-speaking countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay where there are few people of African origin and appearance, negro (negra for females) is commonly used to refer to partners, close friends or people in general independent of skin color. In Venezuela the word negro is similarly used, despite its large African descent population.
It is similar to the use of the word "nigga" in urban communities in the United States. For example, one might say to a friend, "Negro ¿Como andas? (literally "Hey, black one, how are you doing?"). In this case, the diminutive negrito is used, as a term of endearment meaning "pal", "buddy" or "friend". Negrito has come to be used to refer to a person of any ethnicity or color, and also can have a sentimental or romantic connotation similar to "sweetheart", or "dear" in English (in the Philippines, negrito was used for a local dark-skinned short person, living in the Negros islands among other places).
In other Spanish-speaking South American countries, the word negro can also be employed in a roughly equivalent form, though it is not usually considered to be as widespread as in Argentina or Uruguay (except perhaps in a limited regional and/or social context). In Brazil, it heavily depends on the region. In Rio de Janeiro, for example, where the main racial slur against black people is crioulo (literally creole i.e. American-born African), preto/preta and pretinho/pretinha can along extremely informal situations be used the same ways as negro/negra and negrito/negrita in Spanish-speaking South American, but it heavily changes in the nearby state of São Paulo, where crioulo is considered an archaism and preto is the most used racial slur against black people, thus all kind of use of the preto word can be deemed as offensive.
Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negro
