seem more brown than black

Now there's another question... who gets to be called black,and does it really matter? I'm very unclear on it myself, and tend to avoid any specifications of skin colour of people I know except when mixing paints for self-portraits. (And that I rarely do now I don't work in a class.)

Take 'white'. If a blond northern European is unequivocally white, does that mean anyone paler than them is white? Even if they are from Eastern Asia? Does it really matter?