> I'd be very curious to hear what are the objective reasons why "yellow" and "red" are considered offensive when they refer to race, and "white" and "black" are considered appropriate. If you dig into it... it's just happenstance and habit.

All of them are artifacts of White racism, “Black” has been widely (but not universally, and many prefer other terms) adopted by the people it targets [0], as (perhaps less surprisingly) has “White” [1], the rest mainly have not. That’s pretty much the defining difference—the others are “viewed as offensive” because they are, in fact, broadly offensive to the people to whom the label is applied.

[0] largely, at least in the US, as a label of shared identity grounded in experience of White racism.

[1] among non-racists, its often not so much a strong identity (narrower ethnic identities often take that role) as acknowledgement as insofar as race os a thing, that’s a fine name for theirs.

> Colors are just colors.

The use of colors aa names of races (and the way some are also associated with subracial groups) is pretty arbitrary rather than descriptive, “red” Indians, “brown” latin@s, and “yellow" asian/pacific islanders aren’t particular different in skin color in any way that maps to the color names.

I guess they are offensive, because they are not used by their respective races. You don't have Chinese people calling themselves "yellow" and you don't have Native Americans calling themselves "red". But you will have Europeans referring to them as "white" and Africans referring to them as "black".

> You don't have Chinese people calling themselves "yellow"

Of course there are, e.g. the ones who wrote the Baidu Baike article on "yellow people": https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%BB%84%E8%89%B2%E4%BA%BA%E7%... But a term that groups them with Japanese, Mongolians and Indonesians doesn't have much relevance for most Chinese people anyway.

Chinese people refer to themselves as yellow.

Asking honestly... They do? I've never seen it happen in any Chinese media I've consumed, though not speaking Chinese that could have more to do with the translators. I've certainly never heard an American of Chinese decent refer to themselves this way.

Can we get more context on this?

I am not a Chinese person but I have came across "banana"[1] in multiple places, most famously in the movie "Crazy Rich Asians"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana,_Coconut,_and_Twinkie

Americans of Chinese descent are not Chinese. My wife is Beijing born-and-bred and refers to (East) Asians as yellow people, as do many of her friends.

If you want a more objective source and can read Chinese, there's a Baidu Baike (think Chinese wiktionary) page for the term (黄种人):

https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%BB%84%E8%89%B2%E4%BA%BA%E7%...

They do, but it’s not as common as black and white in English (American) media. There’s even an old song, pretty well-known, that has 2 lines that can be translated as “Black eyes, black hair, and yellow skin, forever more shall be the descendants of the dragon” (descendants of the dragon means of Chinese descent in the context of the song).

I learned the Japanese word 黄色人種 (yellow race) from a Japanese women when I asked how to appropriately designate "asian people".

(But it's definitely not the most common expression)

Well there's terms like banana, egg and the like but yeah. Same with Oriental vs Caucasian/Asian/African/European etc.

It's not hard to point out exceptions, but let's not go there, I guess.