“People of Color” Do Not Exist

“Looking at the highest income Americans by ethnicity, we likewise find a hodgepodge of people of many colors, with peoples largely from East and South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East at the top.”

When the prominent lawsuit alleging racial discrimination against Asian Americans in admissions by Harvard University was filed in 2018, one argument repeatedly advanced against the endeavor is that the suit, among other things, is some sort of stratagem by the white establishment to create fissures among sub-groups within the larger organic group of “people of color.”

“When privileged Asian-Americans argue alongside whites that reverse discrimination is taking place, they allow themselves to be used as a wedge group, to divide people of color and position them against each other and, indeed, against less privileged Asian-Americans,” an article entitled “The ‘Whitening’ of Asian Americans” in The Atlantic by Iris Kuo tells us. Indeed, the term “people of color” has come to occupy such a foundational place in our verbiage (and in the way we view ourselves as a society) that few now stop to think whether the commonality it seeks to identify exists in the first place.

Here, as in many such instances, facts and data give us an answer: “people of color” reflects little more than an aspirational, political endeavor to forge allegiances against “white” people among an array of peoples whose experience of life in our society could not be more dissimilar.

The history of “people of color” is detailed on NPR’s race and culture outlet, Code Switch, here. Some of the highlights include these:

• According to the OED, the term’s first recorded use was in 1797, in a French variant, when it was used in a survey of the Haitian population to refer to people of mixed-race heritage. Later, the OED tells us, “in Britain it was the accepted term for black, Asian, or mixed-race people until the 1960s.”
• In a November 20, 1988 installment of his always fascinating “On Language” column in The New York Times, William Safire reported on a similar phrase, “citizens of color” in Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech.
• “Today,” we are told, the term “usually covers all/any peoples of African, Latino/Hispanic, Native American, Asian or Pacific Island descent, and its intent is to be inclusive.”
• The article ends on a quote from Prof. Salvador Vidal-Ortiz’s entry in the Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity and Society (2008):

“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 negroes, 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.”