Today the term "person of color" is primarily used to describe any person who is not considered white in the United States. During various periods in US history, persons of color included African Americans, Latino Americans, Italian Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Pacific Islander Americans, Middle Eastern Americans and multiracial Americans. The term emphasizes common experiences of systemic racism. The term may also be used with other collective categories of people such as "communities of color", "men of color", and "women of color". The acronym BIPOC refers to black, indigenous, and other people of color and aims to emphasize the historic oppression of black and indigenous people. The term "colored" was originally equivalent in use to the term "person of color", but usage of the appellation "colored" in the Southern United States gradually came to be restricted to "negroes", and is now considered a racial pejorative.
History
The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style cites usage of "people of colour" as far back as 1796. It was initially used to refer to light-skinned people of mixed African and European heritage. French colonists used the term gens de couleur to refer to people of mixed African and European descent who were freed from slavery in the Americas. In South Carolina and other parts of the Deep South, this term was used to distinguish between slaves who were mostly "black" or "negro" and free people who were primarily "mulatto" or "mixed race". After the American Civil War, "colored" was used as a label exclusively for black Americans, but the term eventually fell out of favor by the mid-20th century. Although American activist Martin Luther King Jr. used the term "citizens of color" in 1963, the phrase in its current meaning did not catch on until the late 1970s. In the late 20th century, the term "person of color" was introduced in the United States in order to counter the condescension implied by the terms "non-white" and "minority", and racial justice activists in the U.S., influenced by radical theorists such as Frantz Fanon, popularized it at this time. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was in wide circulation. Both anti-racist activists and academics sought to move the understanding of race beyond the black-white dichotomy then prevalent. The phrase "women of color" was developed and introduced for wide use by a group of black women activists at the National Women's Conference in 1977. The phrase was used as a method of communicating solidarity between non-white women that was, according to Loretta Ross, not based on "biological destiny" but instead a political act of naming themselves.
BIPOC
The acronym BIPOC, referring to "black, indigenous, and people of color", first appeared in the 2010s. By June 2020, it had become more prevalent on the internet, as racial justice awareness grew in the US in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. The term aims to emphasize the historic oppression of black and indigenous people. The BIPOC Project promotes the term in order "to highlight the unique relationship to whiteness that Indigenous and Black people have, which shapes the experiences of and relationship to white supremacy for all people of color within a U.S. context."
Political significance
According to Stephen Satris of Clemson University, in the United States there are two main racial divides. The first is the "black–white" delineation; the second racial delineation is the one "between whites and everyone else" with whites being "narrowly construed" and everyone else being called "people of color". Because the term "people of color" includes vastly different people with only the common distinction of not being white, it draws attention to the fundamental role of racialization in the United States. Joseph Tuman of San Francisco State University argues that the term "people of color" is attractive because it unites disparate racial and ethnic groups into a larger collective in solidarity with one another. Use of the term "person of color", especially in the United States, is often associated with the social justice movement. Style guides from the American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style, the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Mount Holyoke College all recommend the term "person of color" over other alternatives. Unlike "colored", which historically referred primarily to black people and is often considered, "person of color" and its variants refer inclusively to all non-European peoples—often with the notion that there is political solidarity among them—and "are virtually always considered terms of pride and respect."
Criticism
Many critics, both whites and non-whites, of the term object to its lack of specificity and find the phrase racially offensive. It has been argued that the term lessens the focus on individual issues facing different racial and ethnic groups. Several people, whites and non-whites alike, have compared it to the terms "colored" and "negro". The term has also come under fire as an inaccurate modifier for "White Hispanic and Latino Americans" and Spaniards. The term incorrectly racializes this segment of the Hispanic demographic, projecting "coloredness" onto people who are, in fact, of European extraction. This is particularly true in the case of Spaniards and Latino Americans from South American countries with large proportions of "White Latin Americans". While many Latinos are indeed "people of color," many are not, as "latino" is an ethnic rather than a racial category.
