Person of color

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The term "person of color" (Template:Plural form: people of color or persons of color; abbreviated POC)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> is used to describe any person who is not considered "white". In its current meaning, the term originated in, and is associated with, the United States. From the 2010s, however, it has been adopted elsewhere in the Anglosphere (often as person of colour), including relatively limited usage in the United Kingdom,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Canada,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Australia,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Ireland,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> and South Africa.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

In the United States, the term is involved in the various definitions of non-whiteness, including African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Pacific Islander Americans, multiracial Americans, and some Latino Americans, though members of these communities may prefer to view themselves through their cultural identities rather than color-related terminology. The term, as used in the United States, emphasizes common experiences of systemic racism, which some communities have faced.<ref name="FranklinBoyd-Franklin2006">Template:Cite journal</ref><ref name="AlvarezNeville2016">Template:Cite book</ref> The term may also be used with other collective categories of people such as "communities of color", "men of color" (MOC), "women of color" (WOC),<ref name=houghton356>Template:Cite book</ref> or "librarians of color".<ref name="ALM20180102">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The acronym "BIPOC" refers to "black, indigenous, and other people of color" and aims to emphasize the historic oppression of black and indigenous people. The term "colored" was originally equivalent in use to the term "person of color" in American English, but usage of the appellation "colored" in the Southern United States gradually came to be restricted to "Negroes",<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and is now considered a racial pejorative.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Elsewhere in the world, and in other dialects of English, the term may have entirely different connotations, however; for example, in South Africa, "Coloureds" refers to multiple multiracial ethnic groups and is sometimes applied to other groups in Southern Africa, such as the {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} of Namibia.

HistoryEdit

The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style cites usage of "people of colour" as far back as 1796. It was initially used to refer to light-skinned people of mixed African and European heritage.<ref name=houghton356/> French colonists used the term gens de couleur ("people of color") to refer to people of mixed African and European ancestry in the Americas who were not enslaved.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> In South Carolina and other parts of the Deep South, this term was used to distinguish between slaves who were mostly "black" or "Negro" and free people who were primarily "mulatto" or "mixed race".<ref>Powers, Bernard. Black Charlestonians: a Social History 1822-1885. University of Arkansas Press, 1994</ref> After the American Civil War, "colored" was used as a label almost exclusively for black Americans, but the term eventually fell out of favor by the mid-20th century.<ref name=houghton356/>

Although American activist Martin Luther King Jr. used the term "citizens of color" in 1963, the phrase in its current meaning did not catch on until the late 1970s.<ref name=safire>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>"The Black Press at 150", editorial, The Washington Post, March 18, 1977</ref> In the late 20th century, the term "person of color" was introduced in the United States in order to counter the condescension implied by the terms "non-white" and "minority",<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and racial-justice activists in the U.S., influenced by radical theorists such as Frantz Fanon, popularized it at this time.<ref name=immigrants/> By the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was in wide circulation.<ref name=immigrants>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Both anti-racist activists and academics sought to move the understanding of race beyond the black–white dichotomy then prevalent.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

The phrase "women of color" was developed and introduced for wide use by a group of black women activists at the National Women's Conference in 1977.<ref name="socimages-woc">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The phrase was used as a method of communicating solidarity between non-white women that was, according to Loretta Ross, not based on "biological destiny" but instead a political act of naming themselves.<ref name="socimages-woc" />

In the twenty-first century, use of the term and the categorization continued to proliferate: for example, the Joint Council of Librarians of Color (JCLC), a recurring conference of the American Library Association, which uses the "of color" designation for its five ethnic affiliate associations. They include: the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, the American Indian Library Association, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, the Chinese American Librarians Association, and REFORMA: The National Association to Promote Library & Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking.<ref name="ALM20180102" />

Political significanceEdit

According to Stephen Satris of Clemson University, there are two main racial divides in the United States. The first is the "black–white" delineation; the second racial delineation is the one "between whites and everyone else", with whites being "narrowly construed" and everyone else being called "people of color".<ref name=Zack>Template:Cite book</ref> Because the term "people of color" includes vastly different people with only the common distinction of not being white, it draws attention to the perceived fundamental role of racialization in the United States. Joseph Tuman of San Francisco State University argues that the term "people of color" is attractive because it unites disparate racial and ethnic groups into a larger collective in solidarity with one another.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Use of the term "person of color", especially in the United States, is often associated with the social-justice movement.<ref name="AdamsBell1997">Template:Cite book</ref> Style guides from the American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style,<ref>Houghton Mifflin Company, p. 319</ref> the Stanford Graduate School of Business,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and Mount Holyoke College<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> all recommend the term "person of color" over other alternatives. Unlike "colored", which historically referred primarily to black people and is often considered offensive, "person of color" and its variants refer inclusively to all non-European peoples—often with the notion that there is political solidarity among them—and, according to one style guide, "are virtually always considered terms of pride and respect".<ref name=houghton356/>

CriticismEdit

Many critics of the term, both white and non-white, object to its lack of specificity and find the phrase racially offensive.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn It has been argued that the term lessens the focus on individual issues facing different racial and ethnic groups,Template:Sfn particularly African Americans whom Michael Holzman argues ignores the specific legacy of historical disadvantage in the United States.Template:Sfn Preserving "whiteness" as an intact category while lumping every other racial group into an indiscriminate category ("of color") replicates the marginalization that the term was intended to counter.Template:Sfn Other commentators state that the term "people of color" is a misnomer and an arbitrary term in which people who are white are mislabeled as people of color.Template:Sfn People of color also encompasses various heterogeneous groups which have little in common,Template:Sfn with some arguing that American culture as a whole does not deliberate on economic inequality or issues of class.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

Political scientist Angelo Falcón argues that the use of broad terms like "person of color" is offensive because it aggregates diverse communities and projects "a false unity" that "obscure[s] the needs of Latinos and Asians".Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Citing the sensitivity of the issue, Falcón suggested that there should be "a national summit of Black, Latino and Asian community leaders" to discuss "how can the problem of the so-called 'black/white binary' be tackled in the way it respects the diversity it ignores and helps build the broader constituency for racial social justice that is needed in the country" and to "open the way for a perhaps much-needed resetting of relations between these historically-discriminated against communities that can lead to a more useful etymology of this relationship".Template:Sfn

Daniel Lim has also been criticized for the term for centering whiteness, framing non-white identities in relation to it and implying that whiteness is the default, race-neutral category. This positioning suggests that race is only relevant for non-white people, reinforcing the idea that whiteness is the norm and other identities are deviations.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Critics argue this dynamic marginalizes non-white groups even as the term seeks to unite them, and some individuals express discomfort with having their identities defined in relation to whiteness rather than independently.

Comedian George Carlin described "people of color" as "an awkward, bullshit, liberal-guilt phrase that obscures meaning rather than enhancing it", adding, "What should we call white people? 'People of no color'?"<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

The use of the phrase person of color to describe white Hispanic and Latino Americans and Spaniards has been criticized as inaccurate.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The United States census denotes the term "Latino" as a pan-ethnic label, rather than a racial category. Although many Latinos may qualify as being "people of color", the indiscriminate labeling of all Latinos as "people of color" obscures the racial diversity that exists within the Latino population itself, and, for this reason, some commentators have found the term misleading.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

BIPOCEdit

The acronym BIPOC, referring to "black, indigenous, (and) people of color", first appeared around 2013.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> By June 2020, it was, according to Sandra Garcia of The New York Times, "ubiquitous in some corners of Twitter and Instagram",<ref name="nyt-bipoc-garcia">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> as racial justice awareness grew in the United States in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. The term aims to emphasize the historic oppression of black and indigenous people, which is argued to be superlative and distinctive in U.S. history at the collective level.<ref name="parade-sager">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The BIPOC Project promotes the term in order "to highlight the unique relationship to Whiteness that Indigenous and Black (African Americans) people have, which shapes the experiences of and relationship to white supremacy for all people of color within a U.S. context".<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

The term BIPOC does not appear to have originated in the black and Indigenous American communities, as it had been adopted much more widely among white Democrats than among people of color in a 2021 national poll.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Asian and Latino Americans have often been confused as to whether the term includes them.Template:Sfn The centering of black and Indigenous people in the acronym has been criticized as an unnecessary, unfounded, and divisive ranking of the oppression faced by the communities of color.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> The acronym's purposeful and definitional assertion that the historical and present-day suffering experienced by black and Indigenous people is more significant in kind or degree than that of other non-white groups has been described as casting communities of color in an oppression Olympics that obscures intersectional characteristics, similarities, and opportunities for solidarity in the struggle against racism.Template:Sfn Critics argue that the systems of oppression foundational to U.S. history were not limited to the slavery and genocide suffered by black and Indigenous Americans, but also included the Asian-American and Latino-American experiences of oppression under the Chinese Exclusion Act and the doctrine of manifest destiny.Template:Sfn Noting that "Black and Indigenous people are not at the center of every contemporary racial issue",Template:Sfn other commentators have found it problematic that the ascendancy of the term coincided with the pronounced rise in anti-Asian hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic.Template:Sfn By rendering Asian Americans as an unnamed "remnant", critics argue that the acronym renders the racial discrimination they experience invisible, thereby perpetuating harmful model minority and perpetual foreigner stereotypes.Template:Sfn Some critics advocate a return to "POC" for its emphasis on coalition-building,Template:Sfn<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> while others call for a contextual approach that names "the groups actually included and centered in the arguments themselves".Template:Sfn The term has also been criticized for being redundant.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="nyt-bipoc-garcia"/>

Person of color

Contents

HistoryEdit

Political significanceEdit

CriticismEdit

BIPOCEdit

See alsoEdit

ReferencesEdit

External linksEdit