Hey, I appreciate you writing in! I’ll explain my thinking behind the term here.
I too grew up in a former British colony, so while I did have a concept of whiteness and therefore do not see myself as “white”- I want to emphasise that the term “person of colour” does have different political and cultural implications than “non-European” or perhaps “non-white”. Simply, I do not see myself as “white” because of British colonialism, but I does not mean I see myself as a “person of colour”. I see myself as Han Chinese, East Asian or Asian. “ In general, I believe the term should not be used carelessly outside the US due to different ideas of whiteness between the US and Europe, as well as other countries in the Americas, where race isn’t perceived the exact same way. I don’t believe it should be used at all in the non-Western context.
1. Person of colour is a term that specifically originated in the context of the United States’ system of colourist racism, of Jim Crow, of slavery, where the idea of “white” became a vehicle to confer privilege. I say “vehicle” because whiteness has always been a social construct. in much earlier parts of US history, several light-skinned European ethnic groups were not allowed to access whiteness, like Irish people. Today, they are seen as white. Although the term has been used carelessly by many people on tumblr, “person of colour” is first and foremost a racialised identity taken on to organise against white supremacy- in Western contexts.
2. I don’t believe it should be applied to non-Western contexts firstly, because the history of Asian colourist discrimination has actually long-predated European colonial rule. Further, it doesn’t quite just exist as a marker of racial otherness, but as a class division. Fair skin has been prized in China, Japan and Korea for thousands of years due to classism. I believe it is the case with India too- from what I know, it was very much tied to the ancient Indian caste system or other class/regional divisions. That is not to say that Western beauty standards don’t help to reinforce this preference today, but it would be inaccurate for us to ascribe this obsession for light skin all to recent European imperialism. Recognising its ancient roots is crucial: as a light-skinned East Asian, nobody has ever tried to sell me skin-whitening cream, unlike my other Han Chinese friends who were darker-skinned.
3. As “person of colour” is an organising tool against white supremacy, I do not believe it has much relevance in non-Western contexts because we are no longer under European colonial rule. This is not to say its legacy doesn’t still affect us, but that the fault lines and tensions that matter are very often not going to centre so much around whiteness anymore in day-to-day life. I feel white privilege can be discussed there without us defining ourselves as “persons of colour”.
- Primarily, I am against the term because it posits a false illusion of solidarity that erases local oppressor-oppressed dynamics, and centering on whiteness very often becomes a tool of deflection for their own crimes (like in Mugabe’s ZImbabwe, when he appropriated land from white farmers but mostly gave it to his cronies who didn’t utilise the land properly, causing food shortages that hurt thousands of black Zimbabweans.) On another level, I don’t wish to centre around whiteness all the time because I think the fixation on it at the expense of other fault lines is in of itself a perpetuation of Eurocentic/whitecentric history and narratives.
- To me, the attendant notions of solidarity underpinning the idea of POC have very little relevance when outside the Western world, our oppressive structures and systems of privileges are very often run by other non-Europeans. Whiteness is the “default” in the US, but in mainland China? It’s being Han Chinese. Han Chinese supremacy is the reason for continued racism and Sinicisation of non-Han minorities like Uighur Muslims and Tibetan. And this racism has a history in Chinese imperialism that long-predates European colonialism. To call all of us “POC” flattens the power structure and posits false solidarity between oppressor and victim- it allows the oppressor to wrongly occupy the space as the victim: as if the Han Chinese general is the same as the non-Han people he has captured for human sacrifices to the gods during the Shang Dynasty. Minorities in the Middle-East and North Africa like Kurds, Amazigh are very often marginalised by Arab supremacy- such as when Saddam Hussein enacted a genocide against Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s, using chemical weapons. The Nigerian government’s slow response to the Boko Haram crisis despite angry protests by Nigerians? The government not caring when people in Northern Nigeria, which is much more impoverished- die. For my own family history, some of the deepest grievances stem from how the Japanese mistreated my grandparents during WW2.
4. Lastly, the term “POC” outside the Western context tends to flatten the power structure between non-Europeans who live in the West or otherwise have a Western background vis a vis people from our ancestral countries.
- White privilege can reinforce Western privilege but they are not totally synonoymous: Because even people not considered white do benefit from citizenship in a Western country or a Westernised background. When it comes to global economic inequality, we are closer to the centre of the empire, to the position of those who benefit, not the exploited. People like myself benefit from speaking English, from appearing “more European” and generally Westernised. It’s the reason my friend, who is of Indian ancestry, was treated very differently by the immigration officer when his British accent became obvious- compared to Indians from India who were on the same flight as him. There would for example, be a huge power differential between an Arab-American soldier and the other Arab people in say, Iraq. I cannot in good faith say my experiences are the same as the Chinese workers who work long hours in factories, many of whom start working at 16. At 16? I wasn’t done with schooling. It was taken for granted I would get a university education, and so on.
5. So, the term “person of colour” is meaningless to me in the non-Western context context, and I personally find it actively harmful when people lump us as “POC cultures” because it purports to create an illusion of solidarity that obscures the massive amount of racism and oppression Asians are enacting against each other till today. Further, I see it as a projection of Western race politics on a non-Western context, which is decentering from local dynamics.
In conclusion, I very much see myself as “non-white” in Asia due to growing up in a former European colony. But I do not see myself as a “person of colour” there. I see myself somewhat as a person of colour in Europe, because it is a Western context where light-skinned Europeans are the majority. Still, not entirely- because it is quite an American term and European racism has a lot of ethnicity dimensions. I tend to see myself as Han Chinese, most specifically.
