I believe mixed-race is the current P.C. terminology. Though, I prefer just plain old human. As a right-winger, I total disagree with classifying people by race to begin with for any purpose other than health and medicine.
Let me ask you this, if your children were of mixed race descent, would you want them to be called mules or mutts? Would you prefer words that are single race/religion specific, like the N or K word?
There is no difference here, the word is used to demean a group of people as sub-human. Most people don't even realize it because no one has ever challenged them on the use of the word. You rarely hear it used.
Disagree on that but kinda all in how you look at it, eh? And since you are the very first person I have ever run across who finds mulatto offensive, I will just note that you are ultra-sensitive.
Look, I just pulled out Websters and "mulatto" is: "a person who has one black parent a one white parent". Says nothing at all about a mule.
Wikipedia says: ""mula", the Spanish word for mule, once a generic designation name for any hybrid" "Mulatto (also Mulato) is a term of Spanish or Portuguese origin describing the offspring of African and European ancestry. The forms "mulatto/mulato" are widely used in Spanish and Portuguese. Many Americans of Hispanic and/or Latino origin identify themselves as mulatto; the term is also used in many other countries. In colonial years the term originally referred to the children of one European and one African parent, or the children of two mulatto parents. During this era a myriad of other terms, both in Latin America and the USA, were in use to denote other individuals of African/European ancestry in ratios smaller or greater than the 50:50 of mulattos: octoroon for example. Today, mulatto refers to all people with significant amounts of both European and African ancestry. The origin of the term is often said to derive from "mula", the Spanish word for mule, once a generic designation name for any hybrid. This is not certain but, as a result, it is considered offensive by some English-speakers, who might prefer terms like "biracial" instead. Others however insist on the use of the term mulatto because it is more precise. It must also be noted that words change their actual meaning independently from their etymological origin. Many words that are now widely used once had a negative origin. (examples are: hysterical (sexist origin), berber, slavic, hapa etc.) Spanish-speakers do not consider "mulatto" offensive. In Latinamerica the term is even associated with beauty and sometimes with artistic ability. An alternate etymology traces mulatto to the Arabic muwallad, which means "a person of mixed ancestry"."