@snood,
snood wrote:I bet (look out! Unverifiable claim follows!)) that most people who dislike or avoid using the phrase person of color are negatively disposed toward the aims and ideals of political movements that are focused on rights of ethnic minorities.
Speaking strictly as one subjective person who dislikes that term: that's not the reason I dislike it. It's not even the term in itself I don't like, and I certainly have nothing against strengthening the rights of ethnic minorities. Rather, I'm annoyed by the speed at which the newly-coined, "sensitive" language of today turns into the derogative language of tomorrow, and how this dynamic powers an eternal spiral of re-branding minorities.
Until the 1960s, social reformers, Black and White, where perfectly content to use the word
Negro. Then the Black Power people convinced the Civil Rights movement that
Negro was a slavery word, and established the term
Black in its place. (I believe there's one identifiable Mississippi march in 1966 where Stokeley Carmichel persuaded Martin Luther King to start using that term and stick to it.) Then the word
Black became offensive to some and had to be replaced by
Afro-American, which in turn was replaced by
African American. And now comes
people of color---not to be confused with
colored people, which is offensive.
I totally get that Black Americans don't want to be called
Negroes anymore, and that they wanted to change their name
once. But I'm getting tired of this linguistic treadmill that's kept turning since the 1960s. It's beginning to look like something out of
Boondocks. Except that
Boondocks is satire, whereas the renaming treadmill is supposedly serious.
And
that's why I'm annoyed by coinages like
people of color. My opinion of civil rights movements doesn't enter into it.