today a girl in my social studies class called sandra cisneros a person of color, and afterwards the teacher started using the term too
let me tell you why "person of color" pisses me off- and this isn't even mentioning the fact that i thought we were past the era of whites vs non-whites and calling black ppl colored ("i'm not saying down syndrome people are handicapped people, i'm saying they're people of handicapation!")
"person of color" is a term coined by non-white people, and generally accepted by non-white people, which is what differentiates it from calling someone "colored".
sandra cisneros is hispanic.
the primary cultural ancestor of the hispanics are the spaniards.
the spaniards were not buddy-buddy with native americans, asians, or the africans that they imported as slaves to the new world.
lumping the hispanic ethnicity in with everything else that isn't euro-american completely disregards history. ironically, it disregards an entire chapter of white colonialism and imperialism, despite the people who use the term PoC usually being critical of whites oppressing non-whites.
I think this is a bit reductive. The impression I get is that Latino/Hispanic ethnicity comes from Europeans and indigenous people having kids. So Latino/Hispanic people were "buddy-buddy" with Native Americans, because they were (and are) partly Native American themselves.
"Hispanic" is sort of a misnomer that implies that Hispanic people exclusively descend from Spaniards, which I think is untrue.
it turns an honest conversation into "us vs them".
my father is a cuban immigrant. i am considered a person of color. i hate the loving term so much. my cultural heritage is not intertwined with ethnic african-americans, japanese-americans, chinese-americans, etc.
"Person of color" isn't a word that's meant to describe the cultural heritage of anyone. It's used to talk about racial power dynamics. (people of color in contrast to white people who held and hold more power generally in most social hierarchies) The term is completely innocuous unless you don't believe in these racial power dynamics, in which case your issue should be with the philosophy behind the word and not the word itself.
and what about the other historically distrusted minorities? are jews people of color? are slavic immigrants? where do you draw this handicapped line?
My understanding of white supremacy is that they consider Jews and people of color two different groups that conspire to genocide them in different ways? Or something like that?
People of color isn't meant to be a 100% catch-all of "historically distrusted minorities".
it just pisses me off and saddens me that we've literally regressed to using an ignorant and tribal term for the sake of political correctness. and i'm not a whiney whitey. remember, i count as a PoC
I don't think it's ignorant or tribal, nor do I think it functions for "political correctness". Its main use is for brown townysis of racial power dynamics, no one is obligated to say it instead of "non-white" or something more specific like "Cuban".
I found
an interesting NPR article about the term. Here's a quote from the end:
"People of color explicitly suggests a social relationship among racial and ethnic minority groups. ... [It is] is a term most often used outside of traditional academic circles, often infused by activist frameworks, but it is slowly replacing terms such as racial and ethnic minorities. ... In the United States in particular, there is a trajectory to the term — from more derogatory terms such as Broes, to colored, to people of color. ... People of color is, however it is viewed, a political term, but it is also a term that allows for a more complex set of identity for the individual — a relational one that is in constant flux."
The words majority and minority correlate with white and not white in most of the Western world, though, so I don't see why we need "POC" to replace that. Majority and minority aren't tribal and are even more flexible since you can use them in countries where white people are the minority or are being persecuted or something.
Those words aren't fitting though. There are countries like South Africa where white people are statistically a minority but still hold lots of the structural power.
2. i agree that race is still relevant, if only as a result of historical racism. the way i see it, we've created a deep, culturally ingrained class issue out of a historical racial issue- if a broke black detroitian gets the education he needs, he could absolutely rise above and become the last working-class generation of his family (save money-> get kids college fund-> son becomes engineer, daughter becomes medical doctor, etc)
I don't think structural racism is over and I don't think a black man making $70k has access to the same opportunities as a white man making $70k, yfm?
