This is admittedly A Take, but it’s genuine and I hope it will be engaged as such.
I noticed the language here refers to “minorities” in regards to race often. I think that should stop. It isn’t demographics that are responsible for racial oppression, it’s power dynamics and ostensibly anti-racist language should reflect that.
Some might try to point out that in some areas, non-white communities are literally minorities. I only think this is true from the viewpoint of majority-white, European colonialist countries, and that isn’t a viewpoint which should be assumed or taken for granted, given they are the oppressors in this situation. Globally, no single race constitutes a majority. Locally, “minorities” quickly become “majorities” if you draw boundaries appropriately—for example, a given group may be 20% of the population of a given city, but in certain neighborhoods of that city they are 60-90% of the residents.
I’m pointing this out because in general decolonization is neglected in “people of color” spaces so that racially oppressed people strive to become equal participants in a racially oppressive system rather than destroying that system altogether. It would be nice if that did not happen here.
I’m pointing this out because in general decolonization is neglected in “people of color” spaces so that racially oppressed people strive to become equal participants in a racially oppressive system rather than destroying that system altogether. It would be nice if that did not happen here.
what do you mean with this?
Basically, colonialism has had an extremely large impact on us, so large that it basically changes our worldview and works to imprison us.
Less dramatically, think of the civil rights movement in the united states in the 1950s and 1960s. The mainstream appeal was fighting for equal rights as an american citizen. However, america is a colonial power, and as such, it gets a lot of its power from making itself the “best” and the “standard”, and restricting its benefits and resources to those who fit to that standard. So if people of color are chasing to be a part of that standard, then we implictly uphold the system that created the conditions for inequality in the first place.
Rather, decolonisation is an important step because to really be free, you must have self-determination, and the ability to create your own standards and ideas, and that means most importantly dismantling the power structures (especially psychological ones like mental barriers and use of language/linguistic domination).
I noticed the language here refers to “minorities” in regards to race often. I think that should stop. It isn’t demographics that are responsible for racial oppression, it’s power dynamics and ostensibly anti-racist language should reflect that.
ultimately there’s just a degree of pragmatism involved in this verbiage which is why it’s useful—adopting another verbiage largely just changes what people object to, where they feel uncomfortable, or just introduces a complicating variable. people frequently bristle at circumlocutions like people of color and it’s not hard to blame them; hyphenated heritage (your Chinese-Americans and German Turks) frequently runs up against how people self-identify and has its own can of worms with respect to decolonization; using racial descriptors (Hispanic or Latino) will never cover everyone and likewise people often struggle to identify with those because they’re made up and arbitrary; and ethnic descriptors are frequently impossible to “clock” but also themselves are largely arbitrary in a way that can make them basically useless.
minority, for all its other faults, is not a weird-sounding circumlocution and is readily understood by basically everyone, doesn’t really specify heritage or how you identify beyond “i perceive myself as external to the majority” which avoids identity snarls, and is broadly applicable and fairly objective as descriptors in this space go. (you can, for example measure with reasonable confidence who is or is not a minority group.)
