well, the question was
which to me at least seems to be exploring the what an Asian is rather than what the term PoC means.
Regardless, the point stands that neither is well defined.
I don’t see how they are poorly defined. Every use I can think of for “people of color” is for all non-white people. It’s a way to discuss all the racial minorities as a group. And Asian in the US always means East Asian, as in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, etc., and not South Asian or Middle Eastern.
I mean, yes, race is a social construct, but it’s not like social constructs don’t exist. Race is a classification based on physical charactersistics. I know many people who can’t tell people apart from the different East Asian countries, but none who couldn’t tell the difference between Chinese and Indian people, or Koreans and Israelis. It’s fairly easy to me to see that the word Asian replaces what we used to call “Chinese” as a synecdoche, or “yellow” back when colored names were okay.
As for POC, I can just pull up the Wikipedia page. I presume those spelling it “colour” are not in the US, and that is why you are not as familiar with the definition of either term, as used by Americans.
Emphasis added. No, that’s not true. South Asians are more and more often put in the “Asian” category in the US. That is particularly true where I live (in CA) where there are lots and lots of South Asians. Someone who has been in the news quite a bit lately is a perfect example:
As for the Middle East that has all sorts of problem of its own. Iran, for instance, is often lumped in as a Middle Eastern country, but it is undeniably an Asian country.
I often see people cite examples of “See this person? He’s right in between what you could consider white or Hispanic, or black vs. Arab, so this shows that race doesn’t exist.” That’s like saying that “This flavor is right in between sweet and salty, so you can’t say there is such a thing as taste.”
It’s cherry-picking. Sure, with some cases, some people may be a perfect blend of features that you can’t tell race. But nobody would say that a black man with black skin, black hair brown eyes and a white person with blonde hair and blue eyes are literally no different in appearance.
Also, people who say “I don’t see color” DO, in fact, see color or race; it’s humanly impossible not to. They just make less of a deal of it.
I mean…
First of all, the thread is about Asians specifically, which is a gigantic category with so many different countries and cultures, it’s impossible to just lump them into one “race” and debate over whether that race is “colored” or not. You’ve got Chinese and Korean people with skin the same color as Europeans. So you’re really talking about eyes and nose, not “color”, to diffrentiate their phenotypes from European ones.
With “black” people, there are African-Americans who have light skin, lighter in some cases than the skin of many “white” people, yet they themselves would identify as black…then what do you call their kids, if they have kids with a European? “Biracial”, most people would say, though I think that’s a stupid term…then say that kid grows up and marries someone from Finland and they have a child who’s 1/4 African ancestry, and that child has only the faintest traces of any African features, and suddenly he’s considered “white.” The grandson of a “black” man is now “white”…it just makes no sense to me, I’m sorry.
These are phenotypes, and as I’ve said, certain phenotypes correlate with geographical regions. This situation has caused the concept of “race” to develop as an idea, but as the world gets smaller and people from varying geographical regions start mixing more with each other, it will eventually become obsolete.
OK I see, gotcha. Sorry.
I don’t think of Asians, by which I mean Japanese, Koreans, Thais, Chinese, and Vietnamese, as PoC. Back in the day, “colored person” was one of the polite terms for black people. I figure it is just swapping the word order around. So for me, Person of Color means Black Person.
Nowadays it appears to carry a connotation of disadvantage, and generally (apart from Hmong, at least in my area), Asians aren’t disadvantaged.
Regards,
Shodan
My ancestry is Eastern European, roughly half the family has olive skin and clearly visible epicanthic folds, so I’m going to go with “no.” Whatever purpose it might once have had, the POC term has lost all utility.
I have to disagree. At least partially, anyway. I think by and large “Asian” even in the BA still most often = East Asian. It may be changing, but like the now largely complete abandonment of the term Oriental( which was being debated hotly on this board back in the early 2000’s )I think that definition is dying a pretty slow death. I’ll be perfectly honest and say that East Asian is what automatically comes to mind to me and that was what I was thinking of when I responded to this thread.
Intellectually I realize folks in Afghanistan are Asian. But despite living in a neighborhood that is virtually a little India, I haven’t internalized that as a definition. Probably because I’m getting old ;).
Ditto around here. I use the term “South Asian” quite regularly (since I work in the community), but my experience is that using the term “Asian” without any qualifier generally means “East Asian/Southeast Asian” to most people around here. I don’t think the vast majority of people think of “Asian” as including the group of Asians from Central Asia or the subcontinent. I may be wrong, but my experience is that people forget that Indians, Pakistanis, Bangledeshi, etc. are Asian, much less Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kyrgyz, etc.
It doesn’t have to make sense to you to be a cultural reality. I sure hope it’ll be obsolete some day (not that all cultures will blend, but that skin color won’t be linked so tightly to assumptions about culture, especially negative and mythical assumptions)–but for now, people have a generally similar understanding of what races there are within the United States, and people operate accordingly.
Race is as real as money, and just as powerful.
I’ve never felt any need to classify people in that way.
I would consider them to be.
Then again, i’d consider myself to be a person of colour, several colours actually
parts that dont see the sun are a lovely shade of casper the ghost
parts that see it a lot are a nice roast chicken colour, and from there it varies with sun exposure.
None of me looks pink though, at least nothing that isnt supposed to actually be inside rather than outside
“Persons of Color” is not a particularly useful phrase and it’s one I’ve never used in my life - I don’t know exactly who would be included/excluded from that group. Some ‘white’ people have a permanent beautiful bronze or deep brown skin and some ‘asians’ have extrordinarily pale skin. So obviously skin color is not detrerministic of ‘race’. Similarly with hair and eye color. Would you call a black-haired brown eyed Irish guy a person of color? No.
Japanese aren’t Asian? Japanese aren’t people of color? The internment camps targeted whites? What’s your point?
How about if I just say, based on her own experiences, and that of our mixed race children, and the experiences other members have been through over multiple generations here, my wife feels any person who doesn’t believe persons with stereotypical “Asian” features are persons of color (at least in the U.S. and for the purposes of this poll) is either naive or in denial.
WAPs do; immigrants who don’t themselves qualify as WAPs don’t. White, sole-Anglophone, Protestant is definitely a distinct culture; you guys tend to view anybody else as “different from the norm” without realizing what is it you’re thinking of as “the norm”.
Are you deliberately misunderstanding? In WW2 the US interned people of Japanese ancestry, not Asians in general, and the Japanese interned European civilians (mainly Dutch, British and Australian). The Japanese also imprisoned the natives of the Asian countries of the countries they conquered. 'Nuff said about the treatment they got.
Given that Asia includes the Middle East, which tends to be treated as a separate category, and the Caucasus with people who look, well, Caucasian, and the substantial Russian population in Siberia aka Asian Russia, you have to be more specific when talking about “Asian.”
I’m American-born, European descent, you know, ‘white’. My wife immigrated from Vietnam in 2001. We have a teenage daughter.
I don’t see them as POC, because I don’t see them as ‘other’. I guess the feeling extends to all Asians.
I don’t like the term either, but it’s here and it’s used all the time so it makes sense to understand what it’s supposed to mean. That does not mean we’ll get an ironclad definition. But if all you did was focus on the literal color of people’s skins, rather than their ethnicity, you’re going to miss the mark for sure.
But anyone who says “Asians are people of color” isn’t taking into account all that Asia actually is. Most Asians probably do qualify, but a good many do not.