The Re-Emergence of “People of Color”

Abstract

The social category “people of color” has been born twice from the mixing of peoples in the United States. This article seeks to explain the category’s emergence and varied boundaries in the late 1700s and early 1800s, its decline in the mid-1800s, and its re-emergence and spread in a related meaning of enlarged scope since the 1970s. In both phases, “people of color” has served as a bridging identity across racial lines for those not included among whites; both times it has served primarily as a term of respect, not abuse. The category’s revival has rested on a contested people-of-color equation—the equating of other minorities with Black people—and has come in four stages: 1) the advent of a new configuration of governmentally recognized minorities in the 1960s and 1970s; 2) the adoption of “people of color” as a collective identity for those groups, initially among Black, progressive, and feminist activists; 3) the polarized diffusion of “people of color” in the media; and 4) the emergence among activists of second thoughts about the category “people of color” as insufficiently specific. The article concludes with a brief discussion of whether the traditional color line is being redrawn as a people-of-color line.

Men of Color, Linked Fate, and Support for Women of Color Candidates

“…A significant theoretical development in the REP field is the emergence of theories and empirical investigations of PoC, or people of color, identity (Pérez 2021;Pérez, Robertson, and Vicuña 2023;Pérez et al 2022; also see Starr 2022;Starr and Freeland 2023). Despite common usage of the term PoC in the media, researchers have only recently begun to discern the degree to which individuals who can be categorized as such take up the PoC label.…”

School experiences of Black girls in secondary education

“…Both CRT and CLS originated by recognizing the racialized experiences of People of Color (POC) and nonwhite individuals within America's legal system and how they encounter the law differently than their White counterparts. Taking pan-ethnicity to a higher level, the term People of Color (POC) now encompasses Black, Native Americans, and both Asians and Hispanics, as well as other non-White groups (Starr, 2022). CRT and CLS as theories worked diligently to display the differences that exist for POC's in comparison to their White counterparts with the law.…”