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Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

> I think the real problem with euphemisms displacing the original words, is generally they're vaguer. One example is "person of colour" should literally mean everybody, but it's just used as a drop-in replacements for the words before it that are now considered offensive. Substituting one phrase for another does nothing to adjust people's prejudices or intentions when using a word.

I thought the whole point of the PoC euphemism was to be vaguer. It’s not literally everyone, it’s everyone except white people. It’s not a replacement for other euphemisms so much as a supergroup meant to include other minorities in the conversation (one very much in a Western context).

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But to me (not a native speaker), "person of color" is vague and misleading. I didn't even automatically know it's about the person's skin color. First I thought it means a flamboyant, over-the-top person.

If I think about colors in the scientific sense (black: lack of light, white: mixture of lights from all colors), the "person of color" expression would include everyone except black people, but how it is used, it includes everyone except white people (wherever we draw this "white-enough" line, depending on the context).

Why not just use "non-white person"?

As a child I always found “white” weird, because the skin of white people isn’t actually white. The same for black, red, and yellow. The only one that seems accurate is “brown”. So maybe it should be “brown” and “non-brown”. ;)

skin color is determined by pigment (like crayons) so I'd say it's a subtractive color scheme, and black is all colors mixed together while white is a lack of color.

My point was that the words are vaguer, and so less easy to comprehend. White is a colour, pink is a colour, green is a colour. Taking the words literally, everybody is a "person of colour". You can't directly intuit the meaning of the phrase, it requires acquisition of the specific cultural meaning.

But good point about the diversity aspect - you're right, that is a good reason to make the terms more inclusive.

…and then they realized PoC was too inclusive to be meaningful, so they invented BIPoC. To be fair, BIPoC is satisfying to use as a substitute for racial slurs when you're singing along to rap.

So don’t ”white” people have a color? I’m kind of a pinkish beige myself.

IIRC the stated purpose of the euphemism was to make "person" the first word of the phrase.

You can tell that there is some division over whether vague is desirable by the increasing usage of "BIPOC" (black and indigenous person of color)

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