Mar 14, 2023·edited Mar 14, 2023Liked by Berny Belvedere
I find the term "people of color" grating for the opposite reason. It flattens different groups of people with wildly divergent cultural and economic experiences into a single positive category. Somebody who grew up in abject poverty in West Baltimore has little in common with a wealthy Hindu immigrant from India working at a San Francisco startup or a second generation farmworker in Iowa who is hustling to help his extended family in Mexico. All that binds these groups together is having possibly experienced racism from individuals in a white majority population/culture because of their skin color. Treating them as a positive group unconsciously emphasizes the salience of "whiteness" more than if we didn't try to group them together, and erases their specificity. I'm white, so like you, I don't have much of a stake in what all these groups would prefer to call themselves, but I suspect that the only people who are really invested in this term are professionals who like to talk about the politics of race as an abstraction. This seems very condescending to me, as if being the object of racism because of skin tone is all that a "non-white" culture or ethnic identity can consist in.
I find it more useful to use terms that actually indicate why such-and-such a category is salient in sociological, rather than political terms. I prefer, for instance, to think about "people of color" as "racial minorities" in a US context. Everyone understands in the US that we have a dominant white-majority native English-speaking population (for now), a history of slavery/racism/discrimination/etc., and various kinds of negative economic disparities that affect minority populations disproportionately. Skin color might matter ideologically for racists, but what matters sociologically is minority status indexed against other factors like economic prospects, culture, family structure, language geography, etc. If we're comparing the US with another country, like South Africa where different racial minorities are either politically dominant (Afrikaaners, other white residents) and politically oppressed ("colored" populations), we might want to add clarification to the term using adjectives like "politically powerful" or whatever.
Mar 14, 2023·edited Mar 15, 2023Liked by Berny Belvedere
How many people actually use this term outside heavily curated media discourse? I wonder if it's like "Latinx" where many of the people this term is meant to describe find it culturally offensive. At a minimum, it could be perceived as awkward. If this isn't how normies want to talk about themselves, and there's no other technical reason to use the term, then why use it? I'd be more open to the term if I felt adoption were ubiquitous among these groups in general, rather than just among professionals or media-types.
It's also perfectly legitimate for anyone to critique novel terminologies on aesthetic grounds. Does the nomenclature in question cover the phenomenon it is meant to categorized without undue confusion or obfuscation? I argued here that "people of color" fails this test to some degree.
I find the term "people of color" grating for the opposite reason. It flattens different groups of people with wildly divergent cultural and economic experiences into a single positive category. Somebody who grew up in abject poverty in West Baltimore has little in common with a wealthy Hindu immigrant from India working at a San Francisco startup or a second generation farmworker in Iowa who is hustling to help his extended family in Mexico. All that binds these groups together is having possibly experienced racism from individuals in a white majority population/culture because of their skin color. Treating them as a positive group unconsciously emphasizes the salience of "whiteness" more than if we didn't try to group them together, and erases their specificity. I'm white, so like you, I don't have much of a stake in what all these groups would prefer to call themselves, but I suspect that the only people who are really invested in this term are professionals who like to talk about the politics of race as an abstraction. This seems very condescending to me, as if being the object of racism because of skin tone is all that a "non-white" culture or ethnic identity can consist in.
I find it more useful to use terms that actually indicate why such-and-such a category is salient in sociological, rather than political terms. I prefer, for instance, to think about "people of color" as "racial minorities" in a US context. Everyone understands in the US that we have a dominant white-majority native English-speaking population (for now), a history of slavery/racism/discrimination/etc., and various kinds of negative economic disparities that affect minority populations disproportionately. Skin color might matter ideologically for racists, but what matters sociologically is minority status indexed against other factors like economic prospects, culture, family structure, language geography, etc. If we're comparing the US with another country, like South Africa where different racial minorities are either politically dominant (Afrikaaners, other white residents) and politically oppressed ("colored" populations), we might want to add clarification to the term using adjectives like "politically powerful" or whatever.
How many people actually use this term outside heavily curated media discourse? I wonder if it's like "Latinx" where many of the people this term is meant to describe find it culturally offensive. At a minimum, it could be perceived as awkward. If this isn't how normies want to talk about themselves, and there's no other technical reason to use the term, then why use it? I'd be more open to the term if I felt adoption were ubiquitous among these groups in general, rather than just among professionals or media-types.
It's also perfectly legitimate for anyone to critique novel terminologies on aesthetic grounds. Does the nomenclature in question cover the phenomenon it is meant to categorized without undue confusion or obfuscation? I argued here that "people of color" fails this test to some degree.
Well put.