Jing Wei for NPR toggle caption Jing Wei for NPR The question of what to call the "developing world" is a developing debate. Jing Wei for NPR When an armed mob stormed the U.S. Capitol and took over the building on Wednesday, many Americans said that's what happens in "Third World" countries. TV journalists and pundits said it. As did people on social media. Everyone knows what they meant — countries that are poor, where health care systems are weak, where democracy may not be exactly flourishing. But the very term "Third World" is a problem. "I feel like it connotes this superiority and inferiority," says Ngozi Erondu, senior scholar at the O'Neill Institute at Georgetown University, who identifies as Nigerian American and says half her family lives in Nigeria. When she heard the label growing up, she says it struck her as making "this assumption about people outside of the 'First World' — that they lived really different lives, the assumption they were poor, they should be happy to eat every day. As if we don't have the same value as humans."