daretobeDOPE

sabokitty:

I regularly send this video out, because it makes some constantly forgotten points. Allow me to express what I get from it.

The phrase People of Color has been used so profusely in some circles that it has lost all of its meaning and bite. It is not a demographic phrase. We cannot talk about people of color in prisons or public housing, communities of color targeted by stop and frisk, and you are not a person of color. The phrase has come to be used out of fear of saying more appropriately what people mean, like Blacks & Latin@s or Brown people.

And it is fallacy to believe that we need to speak about non-white people in some demographically collective way. Different people experience racism and the system of white supremacy in very different ways, and to box all non-white experiences together (it’s hard enough boxing Blacks or Latinos as an experience) is to create a false sense of uniformity that makes many of those experiences invisible.

People of Color, as Loretta Ross explains, is not something you’re born into. It’s a solidarity term, defined by people who claim the title when they’re in solidarity with each other. I can’t be a person of color, but I am a Latino, and when I am in solidarity with other minoritized and racialized groups, we are people of color.