People of Privilege
The always-eminently-readable Kevin D. Williamson tapped one of my bigger pet peeves of present day, i.e. the categorization and amalgamation of various ethnicities into large baskets, in a recent "The Tuesday" newsletter:
"people of color," a meaningless non-category in which Nigerians and Bengalis are lumped in with Mexicans and Iraqis...
I previously squawked about this bit of woke-speak when I encountered AAPI (Asian-American and Pacific Islander), a term that seems both invented and exclusively used by (usually rich) woke (usually white) types (lets call them PoP, aka "People of Privilege"). The category, which includes everyone from Mumbai to Sapporo to Christchurch (and then some) covers nearly half the planet's population, and categorizes Sri Lankans, Maori, and Koreans as one identity group.
People of Color (PoC) is even worse. It not only incorporates AAPI, but everyone from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego (there's a Rio Grande down there as well, by the way) aka "Latinos," err, excuse me, "Latinx," and everyone whose ancestry traces to sub-Saharan Africa, but excludes North Africans, Middle Easterners, and the subset of Latinos that, by some arcane divination, are dubbed "white." Some may recall the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman episode and trial, where Zimmerman, whose mother was born in Peru, was labeled "white hispanic*" by the entire left-o-sphere in one near-simultaneous paroxysm of disavowal.
These coined terms, phrases, and acronyms serve several purposes:
- They aggregate people into power blocs of significant-enough size* for political purposes, aka power and Other People's Money.
- They serve as signals so that an individual may not only inform others of his or her wokeness, but also identify others of like mind.
- They inform the members of these synthetic amalgamations as to how they should view themselves, with whom they should ally themselves, and to whom they should look for salvation from the baseline state of oppression they've been informed they occupy.
All of these and more are, at their core, cynical. They're about the PoP leveraging racism - real, imagined, fabricated, and projected - for political power and coercive subjugation of anyone who doesn't think as they do.
It's grossly insulting. Conflate Cubans and Mexicans at your peril. Tell Tamils and Koreans that they're "of a group" and they'll laugh at you. Put Mongolians and Samoans in one political basket, and you deserve derision.
Yet that's exactly what these PoP do. It's not only an assumption that people who are not white-European all think alike, it discounts the reality of their ethnicities in favor of a skin-deep judgment.
Which, by the way, is the textbook definition of racism.
On top of that, it's incredibly patronizing. It's "we are here to fix things on your behalf" white-knight-ism, and the trampling of actual cultural identities and individual diversities is of little consequence.
*"Hispanic," adopted by the government in 1980, was about agglomerating the various Central and South American ethniticies into a political bloc large and powerful enough to command largesse from the taxpayers. It clearly worked, and we can surmise that this did not go unnoticed by those power-seekers who followed.