It's time to retire the phrase ‘people of color’

On the first day of his new term, President Trump did what we came to expect during his prior term: He lied.

He said that China operates the Panama Canal. He said that the 2020 election was "totally rigged." And he said that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had turned down his offer to send National Guard troops to defend the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

All of these claims — and several other whoppers Trump told — have been thoroughly debunked by the courts and the media. But Trump also repeated a few important truths, which my fellow Democrats would be wise to consider.

At the top of the list: people of color were one of the keys to his victory in 2024. As Trump correctly stated, he scored "dramatic increases in support" from Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans.

What should Democrats do to reverse that trend? A good first step would be to stop using the phrase "people of color."

I know, I know: I just used it myself. But I have resolved to avoid it from now on. It patronizes different groups by imagining that they share the same perspectives. And it tricks us into thinking that race determines politics, which ignores the complex realities of contemporary America.

In the early years of the United States, "people of color" had two meanings. One referred to citizens of mixed racial heritage, the other to African Americans who had been freed from slavery.

After the Civil War, it fell out of use. Slavery was banned under the 13th Amendment, so it made no sense to refer to a specific part of the Black community as "free." Meanwhile, the rise of state-sponsored segregation and its notorious "one-drop" rule — that is, anyone with any Black ancestry was Black — rendered the mixed-race category obsolete, as well. You could be white or Black, but not both.

African Americans instead called themselves "colored," the name that still marks their most venerable activist organization: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "Colored" remained the favored term until the late 19th-century, when "Negro" began to replace it.

Meanwhile, other Americans cohered around a range of identities. Chinese and Japanese people became "Asian"; Mexicans and Puerto Ricans became "Hispanics." And there were thousands of Indian tribes, who increasingly identified as "Native Americans."

But these different groups didn't imagine themselves as "people of color" until the 1970s, when activists argued that they shared a common experience: bigotry at the hands of whites. "Racism affects all our lives, but it is only white women who can 'afford' to remain oblivious to these effects," a 1983 anthology about "women of color" declared. "The rest of us have had it breathing or bleeding down our necks."

There was also a belief that if these different minority groups joined hands in a single unit, they could muster the political force to challenge white dominance. As New Yorker author Tammy Kim observed, "'people of color' ... helped define a united front against those in power — who were almost invariably white and male."

But none of these premises make much sense anymore. After the 2020 murder of George Floyd, some Black and Native Americans soured on the term "people of color" because it seemed to negate their distinct experiences in the United States. They substituted "BIPOC" — Black, Indigenous, and People of Color — which foregrounded their unique histories.

Growing numbers of Hispanics and Asians believed the term negated their experiences, too. The "people of color" paradigm was premised on the idea that America was a white-supremacist society that did not — or would not — give them a fair chance.

But that's not the way many non-whites saw it. In a 2018 survey, 77 percent of Hispanics agreed that "most people who want to get ahead make it if they're willing to work hard," whereas just 62 percent of the general public believed the statement.

Most of all, as the 2024 election confirmed, many "people of color" simply don't agree with each other. Whereas Trump made huge gains among Hispanic voters, for example, his increase in Black support was much smaller.

But too many people — including many white Democrats — remain wedded to the myth described by Black scholar Tyler Austin Harper as "Nice whites and saintly Blacks and Browns who team up every four years to try to save the country from the Bad Whites."

In Philadelphia, where I live, the biggest political issue of the past year was whether to build a new downtown arena for our professional basketball team. I opposed the proposed arena, because I thought it would harm the Chinatown neighborhood that bordered it. But it was popular among Black clergy and other parts of Philadelphia's Black community, who thought it would create jobs for African Americans.

I am white. So did my criticism of the downtown arena put me in league with "people of color," or did it pit me against them?

The answer is both, of course, because different racial minorities don't always see the world in the same way. It's time we admitted that, instead of pretending that they do — or, worse, that they should.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the advisory board of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.

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