When I want to understand the latest in politically correct speech, I look to the words of Democratic Party politicians. When Democratic politicians adopt a certain usage, that means that it has successfully left the closed spaces of the academy and the Internet and become, if not commonplace, at least received. Lately everywhere you see and hear Democrats referring to “Black and Brown communities”; it’s become inescapable, which is bizarre considering that two years ago I had never heard this term.
When I encounter the term “Black and Brown communities” I have two questions. The first is easy to answer: why does this make my skin crawl? Being called “brown” is personally upsetting to me because not only am I being reduced to a caricature of my skin color, but I am being patronized because the (presumably white) liberal speaker thinks he is somehow respecting me by doing so. Being called “Brown” is absurd to me because it suggests that as an Indian I belong to some kind of reified group that encompasses Indians and Mexicans but not most other non-white groups, as if that caricatured skin color has some mystical meaning. The second question is harder to answer: why do people talk this way?
There is obvious reason to refer to people as “white” and “black”: not just because these are the terms in common usage, but because they refer to ethnic groups created in America, without an active cultural connection to any foreign homeland. Regardless, when I was a child twenty years ago, it seemed that the same forces of euphemism creep that had replaced “negro” with “black” were in the process of replacing “black” with “African-American”; “black” wasn’t improper, exactly, but “African-American” was more right, even if it wasn’t the term that African-Americans used for themselves. The sense that it was improper and dehumanizing to refer to people by colors was so culturally pervasive that it has convinced millions of decent Americans that “Caucasian”, a ludicrously inaccurate term rooted in scientific racism, is actually the politically correct way to refer to white people. Now, instead, educated speakers refer to people as “Brown” whether they describe themselves that way or not. How did the social taboo reverse itself so fast?
An important step on that journey is the term “person of color”. This is such a clunky term (“POC” is no better, of course) because it is so obviously the exact same term as “colored”, which is wildly offensive to this day. One would think that this association would deter liberal society, but nevertheless they have persisted because “color” is such a useful framework. What exactly do I have in common with Trinidadians and Salvadorans and Vietnamese and Lakota, but not with any white people? Since we are all POC, it must follow that what we all have in common is “color”. What exactly is color? Of course the answer is nothing, because “color” does not exist; what these groups all have in common in America is not anything that they have but rather what they lack, which is whiteness. A more accurate and descriptive term would be “non-white”, which would have the added advantage of not being functionally identical to an obsolete racist term.
The problem with “non-white”, of course, is that it centers whiteness: never mind that race in this country is fundamentally a creation of white people perceiving themselves or that every other racial group in America has always had to define itself in relation to whiteness. The real issue is that “non-white” makes white people uncomfortable, because it suggests that they by their whiteness are somehow responsible for whatever social ill they are trying to correct. It’s much wonderful to say “POC” and remove white people from the picture entirely, because now instead of thinking about individuals or even about a society you can instead picture a wonderful rainbow: black and brown and presumably red or yellow.
Like all discourse, this color-based discourse exists because it conveys meaning. Terms like “POC” and its novel derivation “BIPOC” are jargon, and normal people instinctively dislike jargon, but it’s possible that “non-white” would alienate so many white people that it would be even worse. What we can say more concretely is that correct use of “POC” and “BIPOC” serve as a test, with the speaker who passes thereby demonstrating membership in the polite class. That polite class includes Democratic politicians, and so they speak this way too and thereby broadcast that terminology to the world. If that means that someone fails to understand that saying “Brown communities” is strongly encouraged but saying “Yellow Lives Matter” is unacceptable, that must seem like a small price to pay.
Naveed Chowdhury 