Strong Verbs Are Just Better

I dunno enough about the 'war on drugs' to inform you about it, but on PoC I think I can help. It is really the PC term, and I don't know if it's used in, say, the UK but here it's not used so much, I don't think. I get the impression that 'non-white' is used here more, but I could totally be wrong. An Italian-American is not a person of colour, being white European, but people originally from the Middle East or with Middle Eastern heritage are, and so is the Hispanic community.

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An Italian-American is not a person of colour, being white European

That's not an automatic definition - someone or a cultural shift at some point has to define what's 'white European'. I refer you to post WWII migration and the relaxation of the White Australia Policy, when someone had to DECIDE that southern and eastern Europeans could be white if they tried.

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Yes, that's true, but I wasn't going so much for historical definitions as what PoC means right now. I should be able to tell you vaguely when that change was, but my high school history is failing me. I bet you though that originally the change in who was considered white in Australia had a lot to do with, as you said, post-WWII immigration (migration? emigration? I need to check dictionaries) and the Snowy River Scheme.

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Yahuh. Anyway, i asked because it's becoming increasingly evident that the US's attitudes to race don't match up to ours. Who WE think is "white" (ick) doesn't necessarily mean the same people in the states.

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I'd kind of gathered that from reading RaceFail - some Antipodeans (not sure who now) commented that some things just didn't apply/needed tweaking to be relevant and useful for people outside of the US.

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Usage varies, a lot, but in my experience, "people of colour" usually refers quite specifically to African-Americans. Organizations for "people of colour" usually are targeted for African-Americans/"black" people in the United States.*

The recognized races in the United States according to the Census Bureau seem to be "White" "Black or African American" "American Indian or Alaska Native" "Asian" "Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander" "Hispanic or Latino, Any Race" and "Some Other Race". Hispanics may be of any race, which really translates culturally into Black or White. (see here (http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/race/racefactcb.html)).

Italians and many people from the Middle East are definitely not "Black" or "American Indian" or "Pacific Islanders" or "Latinos". Some Middle Easterners might be classified as "Asian", others of them might be "Black" but in popular culture they're more likely to be viewed by default as White...ish. Russians and people from Eastern Europe are probably white by default even though many ethnic groups in Russia are probably closer to Asian.

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Random Star! Don't know where that came from. Sorry.

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Hmm. Interesting. I hear "coloured" and think it ought to refer to any group formerly identified by colour - "red", "yellow" or "black" being the three that come to mind.

... I really don't like the idea of identifying ethnic groups by colour. It feels really really wrong.

Interesting that you'd say middle eastern groups are more likely to be viewed as "white-ish" - goes to show how different the cultural makeup of the US is to Australia's, I suppose. Here, middle eastern cultural groups tend to be the most feared / resented / considered least able to fit in / the group who most need to assimilate (rather than, say, integrate, or get along in a happy multicultural fashion).

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There's definitely a lot of racism targeted against middle eastern cultural groups here in the US but we don't have anything else to call them except derogatory terms, heh. For census taking purposes they are probably "white". A lot of people are stupid and mistake middle easterners for Hispanics, I have noticed.

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wait, your census uses the term 'white'? ICK. Ick ick ick ick.

... I have no idea what our census uses. Probably 'Anglo-Australian' or 'Of British or European descent'.

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I think it usually says something like

white/Caucasian

Caucasian is our PC term for white when you just don't know what kind of white you are.

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Yeah, actually, I've heard that one. That might be what's on our census?

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But Caucasians aren't from the Caucasus. This drives me absolutely insane.

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I know, it makes no sense.

We need a descriptive term for "light skinned" that's short. Light skinned basically works, except that it's relative. "White" and "black" are loaded. But what are you, if you're of significantly mixed heritage? I'm a French/Irish/Italian/Austrian/Hungarian/Romanian-American. Yowza. I think (not completely sure) you can still call me a European American, but what about my cousins, who are Irish/French/Mexican-Americans? And African-American doesn't tell us enough, because African's huge and diverse all on its own.

This topic is too big for me, I think.

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I hate basically all the terms on our census. Especially white but including "black/African-American" because what if you're an American of ... say Berber descent? Are you white? Are you African? What the hell are you?

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I have a question. Is it true that the US census isn't allowed to ask about people's religion? I heard a while ago that it's not, which interested me because ours does - there was a kafuffle a while back, probably just after our last census (2006, I think), about moving "no religion" or the equivalent tickybox further up the list of options, because a lot of people who aren't observant or bother very much about religion just ask their parents which religion/belief system they are, which skews the statistics.

I never know what term to identify people by, because most of them are icky and have all sorts of unpleasant connotations. But then no one has any idea what I'm talking about, because they're expecting to hear the usual descriptions. PoC does sound pretty old-fashioned and ... wrong - probably the only thing going for it is that it's reasonably wide-ranging, but even that's not necessarily a good thing, because hello generalisations.

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EDIT: I killed my link. And reposted to the wrong place. Here you go.

According to the data available from the Census Bureau, questions of religion are not reported on. I've never filled out a census questionnaire so I don't know if they're NOT ALLOWED TO but that data isn't available to the public even if they do gather it.

I do know that for government statistical reasons when I was applying to public universities I was not obligated to fill out my race (it was option) and the question of religion was not asked for records.

The offending link: Census Bureau categories. (http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ACSSAFFPeople?_event=&geo_id=01000US&_geoContext=01000US&_street=&_county=&_cityTown=&_state=&_zip=&_lang=en&_sse=on&ActiveGeoDiv=&_useEV=&pctxt=fph&pgsl=010&_submenuId=people_0&ds_name=ACS_2007_3YR_SAFF&_ci_nbr=null&qr_name=null�=null%3Anull&_keyword=&_industry=)

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I will also add that when I did not fill out my race on the public forms they randomly attributed one to me (without alerting me in any way), and it is an incorrect one. They put me as Hispanic student and I am, in fact, an Anglo-Filipino-AmeriIndian-European student with a Spanish last name.

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iremos.livejournal.com

"Coloured" is only a step up from the n-word. To say someone is "of color" is to reclaim the idea of a diverse ethnic heritage without resorting to the parlance of a very racist era.

Equally, "African-American" is fraught with all sorts of meanings. For example, Obama was criticized early on in his campaign for not being "black" enough because although his father was African, he didn't have the experience of slavery, although it could be argued that Obama in more "African-American" than most "African-Americans" who, because of their distance from their lineage, cannot pinpoint where their African heritage is located on a map.

So yes, a "person of color" is a PC term, but usually not one applied by a white person, but by members of that minority.

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I'm brilliant and am posting things to the wrong places. Sorry!

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Clearly it is past your bedtime, Karimonkey.

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It's 1 AM! I've made a bunch of dumb mistakes because I'm nervous... I sliced my thumb open with a bread knife, sent an email without an attachment, and did Erratic Posting.

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Nervous Karifish? I hope Karifishes aren't like goldfishes, nervous goldfishes keel over and die.

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I'm leaving in 6 hours for my conference and have to meet a whole bunch of strangers in approximately 15 hours and manage all by myself like a Real Grown Up (TM) when I don't have the foggiest CLUE what I'm doing or how my paper got accepted.

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*giggles* ye'll be fine! Me and my army say so.

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I don't think there's agreement in the US about what terms to use.

I have never ever heard PoC used by anybody except 1) the internet and 2) old ladies trying hard to be PC. It always sounds sort of ... not good, to me. On the internet it seems to have a broader meaning, but in Virginia a Person of Color is black. Hispanic/Latino != PoC, PoC is a quaint term for a black human. I heard someone say that you can't say "black" in the USA, but ... that is what my black friends call themselves. Dunno. The newsfolk mostly say African American, which from my understanding causes problemos when referring to black Australians or English folks and such.

I have heard people arguing about what PoC really means, I have no idea. Italian-American = no, but if your skin is literally dark it seems to be okay. The exception seems to be that sometimes being Jewish makes you qualify as a PoC, but sometimes not. Highly awkward.

The War On Drugs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs) (insanely long) is lame. I can't go into detail, it will take me all night, and I don't want to make myself sick.

The worst combination of things:

. racial profiling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_profiling). (note: our relevant cop/coplike-agents are mostly white, and our poor+urban folks are disproportionately nonwhite)
. no-knock warrants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-knock_warrant), just one of the many awful things to come out of the War On Drugs. This is terrible for every American. It shames me as a citizen.

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Thanks for the links, I'll follow them from home this weekend :)

Oh, I'm glad someone else finds the term 'people of colour' uncomfortable. The term 'white' makes me screamingly uncomfortable, too - I guess I actually paid attention in history class, every time I hear 'white' I hear 'white Australia policy', government-endorsed discrimination, jingoism, cultural conservatism, and a whole bunch of things which can generally be summed up as DO NOT WANT. And I *am* technically (and literally, being as pale as a very pale thing) white, which is supposed to mean this sort of thing doesn't bother me.

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I think I'm less conscious of "white", but I understand what you mean, when I think about it I don't like it much either.

The problem is that it's so loaded, but we need a word to be descriptive. She was tall, with blue eyes and brown hair and white(can we use pink? We're pink.) skin. You don't know a body's history.

(I'm actually sorry to linkdump on you like that -- but I have to go to bed!)

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