We Are All People of Color

Us and Them, Together At Last

Disembodied arms of various hues fight for dominance. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Donald Trump is certainly a divisive figure. But insofar as he is dividing the false construct of “people of color,” he is contributing to national unity. As the New York Times puts it, “In the Democratic imagination, ‘people of color’ is a unifying term, a label for a durable coalition of Black and Latino voters, as well as Asian Americans, Arab Americans and Native Americans.” However, Trump is “showing just how imaginary that unity might be” by “inviting Black and Latino voters to be part of the ‘us,’ so long as they acknowledge that there is a ‘them.’” His appeal is working, as the Republicans have garnered more non-white support (particularly among young men) than ever before. While the Times accuses Trump of manipulating divisions within minority communities, the more logical conclusion is that they were never that united in the first place. And though the end of “people of color” may be bad news, even aPOCalyptic, for the Democratic Party, it is a positive development for the country as a whole.

They’re All Non-Greek to Me

First, some context. The dichotomy between “us,” meaning an in-group, and “them,” meaning the rest of the world, is historically common. For example, the ancient Greeks referred to non-Greek-speakers as barbarians because their words sounded like gibberish (“bar bar”) to Greek ears. Thus peoples as disparate as the Persians, Egyptians, and Scythians were lumped together by the sheer fact of being foreign. Plato criticized this dichotomy for obscuring the variety that “barbarian” contains, noting that his countrymen “separate the Hellenic race from all the rest as one, and to all the other races, which are countless in number and have no relation in blood or language to one another, they give the single name ’barbarian’; then, because of this single name, they think it is a single species.” The Greeks coined the term “barbarian” out of ignorance as to the differences between peoples. Its usage then perpetuated their initial obliviousness.

White racists originated the analogous divide between whites and “colored people,”¹ now softened into “people of color.” For example, KKK member Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy was explicitly on the side of white supremacy in a supposedly epochal racial struggle. But today, a book of the same title could be written by a social justice advocate with an identically Manichaean framework but the opposite “anti-racist” loyalty. White supremacists used “colored people” to indicate that all non-white groups shared an intrinsic inferiority to whites. “Anti-racists” use “people of color” to indicate that all non-white groups share an experience of white supremacy, which binds them together in mutual solidarity (even though, in this cognitively dissonant worldview, race itself isn’t real). The moral valence of the terms has shifted, but the underlying binary is the same.

Yet that binary is rooted in ignorance, and thus perpetuates ignorance, even if it’s been weaponized against its originators. It’s as if some of the Persians, Egyptians, and Scythians, because the Greeks called them barbarians, started self-identifying as barbarians to reflect their shared experience of the word. Further, it’s as if the Greeks began calling non-Greeks barbarians not out of ignorance or hostility, but out of perceived sensitivity to their history of being “barbarianized.”² Clearly, the Persians, Egyptians, and Scythians were distinct peoples, bearing no more in common with each other than they did with the Greeks. To lump them together would be inaccurate regardless of intent. “Barbarian” was a negative identity, reflecting not communal coherence but an outsider’s incomprehension.

American Barbarians

As with the classical world, so with modern America. By dividing diverse peoples into two discrete categories, “whites” and “people of color,” American racial etiquette confuses rather than clarifies, lumps rather than distinguishes, and reinforces the salience of race in the name of anti-racism. The above-mentioned Times article defines blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, and Native Americans as “people of color.” Certainly American blacks, as a sociological group, were formed in the context of color-based racism and remain influenced by that experience. But the other “people of color,” with the obvious exception of Native Americans, largely consist of immigrants who arrived in an aspirationally post-racial United States with their own pre-existing identities.³ If these identities do share a commonality, it may be that they are not self-defined by color.

“Latino” isn’t a racial term at all, but signifies a cultural background held by white, black, indigenous, and mixed-race New World Spanish speakers. “Asian American” is a grossly simplistic descriptor, falsely implying an affinity between a Japanese and a Nepalese because they share the same continent (itself named and mapped by Europeans). “Arab American” includes a vast array of people conquered by Arab invaders starting in the first millennium, some of whom are phenotypically black (eg, Sudanese Arabs) or white (eg, Levantines who are physically indistinguishable from Southern Europeans). Even the term “black” elides the distinction between recent African and Caribbean immigrants (themselves from different countries) and American descendants of slaves. Further, Americans with mixed-race backgrounds are the nation’s fastest-growing racial demographic, and many of them claim both a white and non-white identity.

Advocates of “people of color” argue that the experience of being “racialized” by whites results in shared interests and the need for a common front. Yet the median household income of Asian Americans (again, a reductionist term in itself) is higher than that of blacks and whites. Additionally, a 2016 survey found that Latinos and Asian Americans were more likely than blacks and whites to agree that “Anyone who works hard still has a fair chance to succeed and live a comfortable life in today’s America.” Rather than being limited by their proscribed race then, most immigrant groups experience the United States as a land of opportunity. Color-based identity hearkens back to a black-and-white America marred by slavery and Jim Crow. But that is not an America that most non-black “people of color” have ever known. Why should immigrants define themselves according to a racist worldview in their new country’s history that peaked before they were born? In the guise of racial enlightenment, modern Americans have resurrected what the wisest Greeks recognized as folly back in the fourth century B.C.E.

The Future is BWIPOC

“People of color” is sometimes subsumed into the acronym BIPOC, which reveals an awareness that the notion of shared non-white unity is fraught. By placing black (B) and indigenous (I) before “people of color” (POC), BIPOC is meant to prioritize (or “center”) the greater injustices that these groups face. To quote a representative definition from WebMD (!), “The term People of Color has a tendency to group all non-white communities together as if they share the same experiences, thus erasing the particular trauma that has been done to Black and Indigenous communities.” But by rupturing POC unity, BIPOC advocates have potentially opened a Pandora’s box. If the suffering of BIs is exponentially greater than that of the other POCs, why group them together at all? Perhaps a more logical racial division would be between BIs and WALs (whites, Asians, and Latinos). Certainly the phrase “white adjacency,” as pejoratively applied to Asians in critical race theory, suggests a de facto white/Asian alliance (reflected also in mating patterns).

Alternatively, we could accept that we are all people of color, including whites, and reject a replay of the Greek–barbarian binary or racial-coalition politics, no matter how allegedly righteous their motivations. To say “we are all people of color” is not to say we’re all the same, or that differences don’t matter. Rather, it’s to say that there is no rational case for dividing white people from the rest of humanity. “Chinese American” is a salient identity because Chinese people share a distinct culture, language, history, and ancestry. “People of color” is a political construct because all non-whites share is a (generally) darker pigmentation.⁴ Semantically, of course, white is as much a color as black (which is to say that neither is a color according to physics). But more importantly, white people are not the subjects of history, with everyone else relegated to objects of the “white gaze” and required to define themselves accordingly. Real communities, not euphemistic “communities of color,” should vote for their own perceived interests—not to mention the interest of the country—instead of along a fading 19th-century color line.

Per the Times, “liberal political leaders have nurtured the theory that minority groups of all sorts would band together in the name of civil rights.” That they are doing so less and less could indicate that Trump is effectively exploiting “bigotry within minority communities, pitting them against immigrants and each other.” But it could also signal minority confidence that their civil rights are secure (or at least as secure as the majority’s) and that they can vote based on their actual politics. Over 40% of black and Latino voters think that urban crime is a major problem and support deporting undocumented migrants, while clear majorities are dissatisfied with the state of the economy. You can disagree with Trump’s positions on these issues and also take the holistic view that a less racially stratified electorate is good for American society. Liberals imagine they’re being cosmopolitan by embracing “people of color,” but are only betraying a provincial understanding of what diverse groups really think. Better to follow Plato’s advice and consider the human race in all its multiplicity, rather than assuming a barbaric stance in the guise of progressivism.

1. Though blacks also adopted the designation “colored people,” as in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

2. Undoubtedly, they would’ve attended elite Greek universities.

3. For some Latinos, the United States migrated to them, in that their ancestors lived in Mexican territory annexed by the United States (eg, Tejanos).

4. To state what should be obvious, the Chinese have never historically thought of themselves as “yellow” or “people of color.” In fact, China has valued white skin for aesthetic reasons since the Han Dynasty over a thousand years ago.