People of Color

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A dedicated community for minority groups and people of color, their interests, and their issues.

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Non-white people are not "minorities" (baraza.africa)

submitted 1 year ago by yaspora@baraza.africa to c/poc@beehaw.org

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This is admittedly A Take, but it's genuine and I hope it will be engaged as such.

I noticed the language here refers to "minorities" in regards to race often. I think that should stop. It isn't demographics that are responsible for racial oppression, it's power dynamics and ostensibly anti-racist language should reflect that.

Some might try to point out that in some areas, non-white communities are literally minorities. I only think this is true from the viewpoint of majority-white, European colonialist countries, and that isn't a viewpoint which should be assumed or taken for granted, given they are the oppressors in this situation. Globally, no single race constitutes a majority. Locally, "minorities" quickly become "majorities" if you draw boundaries appropriately—for example, a given group may be 20% of the population of a given city, but in certain neighborhoods of that city they are 60-90% of the residents.

I'm pointing this out because in general decolonization is neglected in "people of color" spaces so that racially oppressed people strive to become equal participants in a racially oppressive system rather than destroying that system altogether. It would be nice if that did not happen here.

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[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

I noticed the language here refers to “minorities” in regards to race often. I think that should stop. It isn’t demographics that are responsible for racial oppression, it’s power dynamics and ostensibly anti-racist language should reflect that.

ultimately there's just a degree of pragmatism involved in this verbiage which is why it's useful—adopting another verbiage largely just changes what people object to, where they feel uncomfortable, or just introduces a complicating variable. people frequently bristle at circumlocutions like people of color and it's not hard to blame them; hyphenated heritage (your Chinese-Americans and German Turks) frequently runs up against how people self-identify and has its own can of worms with respect to decolonization; using racial descriptors (Hispanic or Latino) will never cover everyone and likewise people often struggle to identify with those; and ethnic descriptors are frequently impossible to "clock" but also themselves largely arbitrary in a way that can make them basically useless.

minority, for all its other faults, is not a weird-sounding circumlocution and is readily understood by basically everyone, doesn't really specify heritage or how you identify beyond "i perceive myself as external to the majority" which avoids identity snarls, and is broadly applicable and fairly objective as descriptors in this space go. (you can, for example measure with reasonable confidence who is or is not a minority group.)