Black cultural theorist Frank Wilderson’s Red, White, and Black argues that early US America was constructed in a racial triangle of Settler/Savage/Slave.  White people, White men really, claimed this land and because they were able to use Black bodies for slave labor, they were able to launch a genocide on Indigenous peoples.  That is, the dehumanization and exploitation of Black people scaffolded the erasure of Native peoples.  This was the racial order set in place in the early formation of the US as a White supremacist state.

This model leaves a whole lot of us out, of course. API folks, Latinos, Middle Eastern folks, and many more of us don’t fit into that racial triangle. We’re not White, and we bring our own histories of colonization.  Many of us were colonized by the US itself, and White people have supremacy over all of us in various and different ways.  But the fact is our land and resources were not stolen from us in thisspace and our ancestors were not brought here as slaves (with some important exceptions).

That place-based specificity is what the term ‘person of color’ doesn’t deal with adequately. As an identifier, ‘person of color’ can be slippery for a lot of politicized, non-Black, non-indigenous, non-White people in the US, for 2 reasons:

1) US/Western imperialism is so widespread that it even imposes its ways of doing racism on the rest of the world, and on people of color.  For example, my family is upper caste, and that caste position is partly what enabled our immigration to the US.  It also means that we’re lighter-skinned South Asians (read: closer to Aryan British colonizers).  Using the term ‘POC’ as my identifier rather than ‘South Asian’ or ‘Desi’ means  I never unpack these non-Western racial systems that are also at play.

2) Many of our communities have benefited variously from racism.  South Asian communities I’ve been involved in use antiblack racism as one strategy of assimilation.  Because as White people have established, the easiest way to shore up your racial supremacy is to be antiblack, displayed in everything from microaggressions to employment discrimination to violence.  We know that people of color can be racist towards each other.  What I’m saying is that many of us also reap systematic advantages from the racist attitudes and structures that are held by our entire communities.

How do we, as politicized people of color, acknowledge the very limits of the term ‘people of color’ and the way it can mask our actual racial situations?  For example, why do we keep using the phrase ‘communities of color’ as targets of police and state violence when we primarily mean Black and Latino folks?  What races are we trying to contain in the word ‘brown’?  Why are we afraid to point to the specificities of racism?  Do we think it will divide us?  Do we think we are really not capable of understanding and working from the different ways we experience racism?