On paper, I'm just another suburbanite. I go to work, go to martial arts, volunteer, and occasionally get trashed with my friends. I grew up in admittedly lower middle class settings, but with two college-educated parents, that didn't last through high school.
Where my story diverges from the slightly-above-average American narrative is that I speak a squiggly language, eat excitingly spiced foods, and attend events where the dress code is bedazzled, then bedazzled more.
Oh, also I'm brown.
Like many Hispanic, Arab, Farsi, Mediterranean, First Nation,... the list goes on and on, my skin color is anywhere from Starbucks mocha to Starbucks mocha with extra whip. Living in the US, there's no reason to assume I was born here, because every one of my genes has come from overseas.
So why do I care when I see "people of color" in whatever news article?
For starters, the only place in which it makes sense to juxtapose a white majority against everyone else is the West (and, by the way, that's more so a political than demographic majority these days, at least in urban centers). So trying to use this term in a global context is, ironically, Eurocentric as hell.
Now, that's not what really gets under my skin. What gets under my skin is simpler: not being white doesn't make me privy to the secrets of any non-white struggle.
Black Lives Matter is clearly important and relevant. But I don't get it! I have never been, and will hopefully never be, on the receiving end of that kind of discrimination.
And yet there's all these stories about negative stereotyping or violence that throw out this blanket statement, and either you're using a special definition of "color" that includes socioeconomic as well as racial connotations (which is itself stereotyping), or you're yet another person who has somehow missed the memo that it's 2015, and we live in a global, diverse society, one where Asia is richer than Europe.
And, by the way, with parents who immigrated on a student visa and my total lack of accent, I will never be on the receiving end of "go back to your home country," either.
There Is No Us vs Them
The only good reasoning I've seen for this term is that it's a way to take back "colored person" by putting the person first. And even the latter term isn't always used in a negative context. But the founding story of the NAACP is clearly centered on black Americans, for reasons which are historically sound but which have nothing to do with the world we inhabit today, a world where indigenous people like the Saami and disenfranchised minorities like the Chechen are white-skinned and people like me, who do well enough in the US thanks to a strong education and support from my parents, and then go to my parents' country to live like the 1% because my relatives overseas are wealthy.
"People of color" implies the existence of an opposite, but what exactly is that supposed to be, and what purpose does it serve? In what universe do I not have a ton of privilege, even if it is marred by subconscious bias? Did you relate to my experience just because you're not white? As a white person, are you confused by my suburban lifestyle?
Imagine bucketing LGBTQIA people like this. "What are people of nontraditional orientations complaining about? Nontraditionally oriented marriage just got legalized in all 50 states!" Except I'm actually talking about transgendered people, and if you follow the news that isn't about attractive celebrities or at least watch John Oliver then you know that transgender rights have a long, long way to go in the West.
If we didn't live in a multicultural, and even integrated (with caveats), society, maybe "people of color" would make sense, because those non-majority people would have as much of a shared experience as homosexuals in the 20s. Except that I'm sure you're going "wait, that still wasn't a thing," because here's the truth: lumping any group of people together is reducing that group to a single representation.
It's 2015. We should be too well-informed to oversimplify.
I can't stop you from referring to yourself as a person of color. In fact, that's your right, even if no one else would agree with you.
But I can ask you to think twice before erasing the diversity of global narratives in favor of a white vs non-white struggle (which, by the way, has never been completely a thing), and I can damn well ask you what you mean when you spend thirty pages on a single socioeconomic, racial group and end with "people of color have this problem."
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