Nobody’s yet convinced me I’m using the term wrong. As best I can tell the term meant “black person” right from the start - or more specifically, anyone ‘black enough’ to be enslaved as a result. Any claims that the word started out as merely meaning “non-white” and was appropriated later by racists are incorrect, as far as I can determine.
I do recognize that, sometime after the term fell out of favor due to it having become basically a racist slur, some modern people have decided to appropriate it, warp it, and crack it open to mean “non-white” via various specious arguments. (Specious because any real argument would include white people in the term too - we’re not transparent.)
As you might guess I don’t care much of this appropriation of the term, and more to the point it hasn’t even cracked the surface of my consciousness. To this day, when I hear the term “person of color” I assume 1) they’re talking about black people, and 2) they’re tacky for using a term now considered somewhat of a slur.
No part of the current discussion has changed my thoughts on the matter.
Which matter, that when I say “person of color” I don’t mean “anybody who’s not transparent” or “anybody who’s part of an oppressed demographic” or whatever it’s supposed to mean now? Probably not. I wouldn’t use the term anyway (outside of a discussion of the term itself), but I’m certainly not going to start misusing it now.
Honestly attempting to intentionally redefine any word is a dodgy business, in my opinion - it deliberately makes the language less clear and promotes misunderstandings. You can think of it as trying to ‘reclaim’ the word, but to me it’ll always sound like clueless people slinging an old slur around with little comprehension of what they’re doing.
You can use the term however you want to use it, or not use it at all. Just be aware, as I said before, of what other people mean when they use the term.
Dude, it’s not the people fighting against racism that invented racism.
Crack open a history book. There was this continent called America. Some guys from Europe sailed over here. They started to conquer the place, and once they’d got a good start noticed that they needed more people to work the land since the native inhabitants kept dying, so they started bringing over Africans. But they didn’t attract those African immigrants by offering great dental plans and flex-time policy.
And so on, and then there was the American Revolution, and then the cotton gin, and then the Civil War, and so on, and you probably should have learned about this in school, but I’ve got time if you’ve got more questions and need more details. I can also answer questions about photosynthesis, how magnets work, dinosaurs, or whatever else you’re interested in.
If all we had do to to fix racism was to stop noticing race, then congratulations, we’d have a utopia. And yes, it really would be that simple, except as you know, it’s not that simple, because people won’t do it. And by “people” I’m not talking about the people complaining about racism.
To circle back to the OP, in 2018 American usage, “people of color” is a synonym for “people who aren’t white”. Oh, it turns out that “white” is a nebulous concept that breaks down when you examine it deeply? Congratulations! You’ve taken your first step into a larger world.
Yes, back in Ancient Rome, the concept of “white” didn’t exist. In the middle ages, the concept of “white” didn’t exist. Yes, people back then noticed that people from different parts of the world had different skin colors, hair colors, and facial features. But it wasn’t a sociologically salient difference, except that people who looked different were obviously from somewhere far away.
Whiteness emerged from the history of the Age of Exploration, the opening of the world to transcontinental economic, social and political exchange. And of course, at first the salient point about these strange people from strange places was that they were not Christians. It’s not cool to enslave Christians, but it’s OK if they’re not Christians. Except then these strange people started to convert to Christianity, so there had to be some other reason they were inferior, and so racism became a thing. And that didn’t stop happening on January 1, 1863, or July 2, 1964.
Now, what do you want to know about photosynthesis?
Oh yes, it’s absolutely correct to characterize me as having made up the idea that “colored person” = “black person”. That’s not intellectually dishonest at all.
And what do such people mean? Hell if I know; they’re using a suddenly-ambiguous term. Given that I’m a cautious sort I’d better assume they’re racist until I learn otherwise, because bad things happen if you give racists a pass.
The fact is, that in 2018 America “People of color” is a jargon term used by activist types to mean “people in America who aren’t perceived as white”. Yes, it is adapted from the old-timey “colored people”. It’s not exactly the same term, though. As was said above, language isn’t mathematics. If it was then “The house burned down” and “The house burned up” would mean opposite things instead of the same thing. But it isn’t, so it doesn’t.
Personally I think the term is a bit awkward, and I’d never use it. If I want to talk about people who aren’t white, I’ll just say people who aren’t white. That doesn’t mean I get confused when other people use the term.