"My understanding of racial privilege and oppression was shaped exactly by the immense antiblackness in my communities. When the discussion on racism began, however, all of us Asian kids broke down and cried. It was clear to us that we didn’t have White privilege, but ‘people of color’ didn’t fit either when the only other context we had for it was a group of our Black peers using it as a solidarity term...
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...
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?...
The POC umbrella is not an excuse to disavow the ways we benefit from various racial structures and sit idly by as our communities reap advantages from racism towards other people of color."
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