people of color

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Monday, February 5, 2001 9:29 pm -0500 Jane P Parker
<jpparker at ISERV.NET> wrote:

> What an interesting discussion.  I am jumping in on the middle of it.
> Certainly, "people of color" is exclusionary by it's nature, meaning
> non-white.  Preferably, all races could be referred to as a variation on
> their own ancestry, such as African-american, Native american, Indian
> American, Chinese american or European american or any more specific
> terms.
>
> Dave

But the point of the revival of 'of color' in the 80s was to have a
self-applied common name for non-white people, for political and social
organization purposes.  Any individual or homogenous group can be called by
a particular ethnic name, but heterogenous but non-white groups can't--and
the organizing principle in the 80s was to have umbrella groups working to
common goals (e.g., anti-racism).  This lessened, in my experience, in the
90s.

This is similar to (but very different still) the use of 'queer' as a cover
term for anyone who's not 'vanilla-straight' (an endangered usage of
'queer', admittedly).  And it's also very similar to the use of 'black' in
South Africa and sometimes the UK to refer to any non-white people.  (I
discuss the South African 'black' example in a 1998 article in
_International J of Lexicography_.)

Lynne

M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320