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Comment by nlitened | Hacker News Reader

Is “person of color” an okay thing to say in US? It really rubs me the wrong way (as a non-native English speaker).

To me it’s kinda like calling people with long noses “people of nose size”.

It is the currently accepted term on the Euphemism Treadmill. In my lifetime alone I have seen it go through colored people (perhaps the original source of your discomfort? and the "CP" in "NAACP"), Negro, black, Afro-American (which was brief but it doesn't mean I didn't have to rename a lot of anchor texts when the academic departments changed names to ...), African-American, then back to black, people of color, now finally capital B Black, with "people of color" apparently now a broader term of usage.

Great question about the term "people of color". Reminds me of when Apple posted on their home page, "Racial Equity and Justice Initiative. For equitable education. For a more just justice system. And for Black and Brown businesses.". The part that particularly rubs me the wrong way is the term "Brown" people. And it’s uppercase. Who wants to be called a "Brown" person? I’ve never heard anyone called that before in my life. It’s incredibly degrading and reductionary. If I am Mexican or Indian, the last thing I want to be labeled is "Brown". Thanks for reducing me down to a single divisive term. What is perplexing is that somehow this term is ok and so is "black" and "white". But saying "yellow" or "red" is offensive. This inconsistency is absurd. Those that are pushing this language somehow think they are morally superior to those of the past. But in reality, they have stepped right into their way of thinking — seeing people by "color" and categorizing society based on it.

>Who wants to be called a "Brown" person?

In high school, there were kids that called themselves brown, but it was always ironically.

It's a strange thing, I've been having to do training sessions explaining that instead of saying "blind people" you have to say "people who are blind" because the former apparently projects more about their identity when it's important to underline that this attribute does not define them

Basically there's a movement to shift from inheritance to entity component, wanting to implement people with has-a descriptions instead of is-a descriptions. This enables data oriented optimizations so that society executes more efficiently & can be more easily extended as new requirements are submitted by the mob

https://www.acedisability.org.au/information-for-providers/l...

Or ya know, not making someone’s disability the leading term you use to describe someone. That what’s most important is their personhood and they’re not defined by some single dominant aspect. And that their disability isn’t part of their identity but is just a fact about them.

Language doesn’t do multiple inheritance well so has-a descriptions are easier to work recognizing that people are multifaceted.

Don't worry I'm in full agreement, OOP is a terrible paradigm ever since it left Alan Kay's original inception which was closer to the has-a message passing paradigm that survives today. Rust's is a pleasure to use with traits instead of classes. Go's interface model is nice too, like a static duck typing. I've always preferred lots of interfaces in C# to abstract classes

I'm sure it depends on the person and the disability, but I'm diabetic and would much rather be referred to as that rather than "a person with diabetes". That's just exhausting.

Diabetes itself is awful. Whether or not it's the leading descriptor makes no difference with that, and I'd rather just use the non awkward terminology ("I'm diabetic" rather than "I'm a person with diabetes".) It would feel almost patronizing if everyone started referring to me that way.

Furthermore, for all that people apparently care about the accumulated effects of microaggressions... Suppose that, every time someone refers to your group—I'll use blindness for an example—they think "blind people—oh wait, I'd get in trouble for saying that, um, I mean, people who are blind". Might this develop a Pavlovian association of "blind people" = "uh-oh, might get in trouble"? Which, in turn, might lead to subtle resentment, mistreatment, and/or avoidance of blind people? It seems that, to rationally recommend one moniker over the other, one has to consider all the costs and benefits, and I don't think I've seen advocates of "person who is X" address this one.

Nobody has addressed it because you are the first person to ever think of it

Eh, I think it's common enough for people to say they feel like they're walking on eggshells because of all the sensitivity stuff, and I think I've seen a few people say that they now feel uneasy around minorities because they're afraid to encounter one who's been taught to have a chip on their shoulder and might throw a fit at the smallest microaggression. It's not a hard connection to draw.

The social justice crowd is unlikely to address it because, with their norms of discussion, mentioning it will likely attract mockery and redirection: "Oh no, we must protect the feelings of the poor white people! How oppressed they are! I'm sure it's just as bad as having ancestors who were enslaved and lynched!" The term "white fragility" might be used; in feminist circles, it might be "what about the menz!?". There's an instance in this thread (flagged) of someone mocking someone who complained about inconveniences. I generally term this "Look at these oppressed people; your complaint is invalid".

These argumentative norms seem to prevent the social justice crowd, as a group, from making decisions of the form "Let's make a minor effort to avoid needlessly offending the people that we're nominally trying to win over".

Depends if the actual reason you are talking about them is that characteristic, right? So talking about black people precisely on race topics seems necessary, whereas if you are talking about a particular neighborhood, it seems unnecessary and racist.

> Is “person of color” an okay thing to say in US?

I'm not English native so that could be the wrong term, not trying to offend anyone. In this context, I mean "discriminated persons/peoples".

IIRC, I saw this on the rules of r/publicfreakout (stating that videos representing "POC" would be moderated). For me "POC" means "Proof Of Concept", so I asked and discover it was about "Person Of Color" and so I use this on English spoken Internet.

But I agree, it's a weird term and I never use this in my native language. Each country have different way to talk about racism and discrimination because each country have it's own racism and discrimination problems.

It is a politically correct term, yes. For now.

Curiously in other languages (e.g. French, Spanish) the equivalent term seems to be frowned upon and better avoided.

Nowadays, POC is more widely used in French than naming a community directly by its skin color. "It is a black neighborhood" -> "It is a POC neighborhood"

Yes. Just think of it as a formalism - it's the currently culturally accepted term if that's the group you're trying to reference.

Lots of languages have a fuzzy formal/casual split where usage is both context-based and a matter of respect, though I think the US is more unique in (1) the degree of energy focused towards coming up with formal names for demographic groups and (2) making them out of words that are also used casually.

It’s been a self label for some time. Given the fact that there is a lot of horizontal aggression built into The System, getting everyone to pull in more or less the same direction is progress in its own right.

The terminology seems to be shifting to BIPOC, to include Indigenous peoples. I haven’t heard an a explanation for why Black is also split out.

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