"People of Colour"

[ajva]

The term "people of colour" annoys me a bit, and I've just thought of a good analogy to explain why.

You see, I'm a person of colour too: in my case, pinkish with definite overtones of red, particularly after I've had my first glass of wine following a week or so of abstinence.

The analogy is this: there are those of a posh English persuasion who seem to genuinely believe that they speak English "without an accent". As if their mode of speech were the default, and all others are deviant. And yet everybody else would describe them as having, ipso facto, a posh English accent. Simple.

You see what I'm saying?

Do you reckon I'm overthinking this, or would you agree? Or is this in fact a well-known gripe and I'm just massively behind the curve? Or maybe you think it's useful to have a catch-all term for people who are not "white" in order to talk about various kinds of racist oppression? If so, what should it be?

Comments

[ellemir.livejournal.com]

IMO, many such terms have the potential to be annoying. The one that gets me is "African-American" because a certain number of PC people from the US use it for anyone who is "Black" without thinking it through. Thus, irritating people from other countries, and also in my experience, many West Indians as while their ancestors may have originated from Africa, they are often very proud of their heritage and dislike it being ignored.

I certainly think of myself as "pinkish" even being as pale as I am, and find myself looking for the goth makeup and making inane comments when people refer to me as "white" although I think I understand where such identification comes from.

I tend to try to call people the terms they are comfortable with, excepting one incident in my early days of teaching. The students in my very multicultural class were horrified to hear our new student refer to herself as "coloured" and gave her a really hard time. She had very African features, pale skin and freckles, and a fabulous naturally red Afro, and had just immigrated from South Africa.
Cue a class lesson on the politics of Apartheid for the class and explaining about cultural perception here for her. She actually cried at first when people called her Black because of all the negative connotations it held for her.