Stop Calling Us “People of Color”

A divisive logical fallacy and its consequences.

Using the term “People of Color” (POC, BIPOC, etc.) is the most obviously divisive way to classify people. It’s also interesting that people who want to “decenter whiteness” classify humans as either white, or everyone else. How can they not see the incoherent hypocrisy?

I understand the need to classify in order to understand and communicate between humans, and differentiation is basic to this process of classification. We need to communicate clearly and being specific by defining, through differentiation, is absolutely necessary and part of human development as a whole and individually. This process goes back to our first attempts to understand our world.

Early creation myths in all cultures contain elements of this separation, or cleaving. We see that there is a separation of day and night, of darkness and light, of heaven and Earth, of land and sea, and of male and female. The separation of these things or concepts occur along lines that make sense as there are fundamental differences, objectively and symbolically, between all of these categories.

For a modern person, we see this concept throughout Platonic dialogues where to get to a definition of sorts — say for a sophist, philosopher or statesman — there is a long process…