people of color

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:35 PM -0500 2/5/01, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
>To get an idea of what "of color" means, I have carefully reviewed
>"Playboy's Women of Color" (1997). Now I understand. A very interesting topic.
>
>-- Doug Wilson

presumably not 'with a nice tan'.  Seriously, though, in connection
with Indigo Som's message a bit earlier--

At 1:40 PM -0800 2/5/01, Indigo Som wrote:
>"People of color" is alive & well, meaning people who are not white. I
>understand that in the past it was more specific, meaning Black (or black,
>or African American, or African, &c.) people. I think some people still
>understand it that way. This is totally anecdotal, but fwiw: 8 or 9 years
>ago we ran an ad for a housemate saying we were a "women of color"
>household. We got several responses from older (to us, in our 20s at the
>time -- they were in their 40s) African American women. In contrast, women
>our age who answered the ad were of various different colors.
>
>Indigo Som

--recall that phraseology from the 1841 John Quincy Adams brief,
"negroes and persons of color".  I think the term has always been
referentially flexible, and predictably if a more specific term
("negroes", "blacks", "African-Americans") exists to pick out a
salient subset, "persons/people of color" will tend to signal either
that one is referred to non-whites who are outside the subset--not
negro/black/African-American (as in the above quote)--or that one is
speaking/writing generically in a context that includes non-whites of
various races, colors, and ethnicities.  At the same time, the same
term would naturally serve as a euphemism if one were reluctant to
name the race directly, as in Indigo's description.  In this respect,
"people of color" is (unsurprisingly) close to "colored
(people)"--cf. the use for 'black/African American' in the C of NAACP
or general southern U.S. use through the mid-20th century (seems to
go with non-rhotic dialects:  [K at L@d]) on the one hand, and the use
for 'non-African non-white' as in (Cape) Coloured in apartheid South
Africa.  "of color" may, however, be more widespread than "colored"
to refer generically to all and any non-white people(s).   (Of course
even if "colored" or "of color" meant exactly "non-white", the latter
would be avoided by anyone sensitive to its 'negative' character,
which treats "white" as the unmarked or default category; cf. the
lovely "melanin-impoverished".)

larry