I am not white in the sense that “whiteness” is a socially constructed racial classification, but I am “white” in the sense that the color of my skin is white. I’m still not really “white-passing”; you wouldn’t look at me and think I’m a white American or a westerner in general.
People will sometimes call me a “person of color”. This tends to make me feel uncomfortable because I’m not really marginalized by society in the same way black or brown people are, and to me PoC is a term used mainly to draw attention to that form of marginalization.
It’s not that I’m not marginalized at all because of the way I look. When I was younger, I was told to shave my beard any time I flew so I wasn’t harassed in the airport for looking too terrorist-y.
Maybe my discomfort with the term PoC being used for me is that it specifically calls out the color aspect, and the color of my skin is white.
So I usually tell people I call myself “non-white” instead. What do you think? Maybe I’m overthinking this. I’d especially like to hear thoughts from black and brown comrades about this: would you call me a person of color? Thanks.
Edit: I’ll probably stick to calling myself non-white, but I won’t correct anybody if they call me a PoC. Thanks for the thoughts everyone, I appreciate it.
Just me spitballing here…
One of those terms is a positive affirmation and the other is a negative one.
“Person of Color” is the positive, in that it tries to communicate something that “is.” While “non-white” is the negative, trying to communicate what isn’t. Both can do the job of telling people around you what they may need to know, but there might be subtle cognitive cues that potentially give extra context.
There shouldn’t be anything wrong with using the term, but I can imagine that at some point, you’re going to have somebody (or have already) had somebody try to explain that one is better than the other. As a weird example, I’ve read comments going off on a person because they used the term “junk” to refer to a their own genitals.
