A Rebuttal of the Nomenclature, “People of Colour”

My gripe is politically [in]correct racial classifications, created by liberal pluralists in positions of power, who then apply them with little or no concern for the reductionism they entail.  

The problem of minority ethnic invisibility arises when all non-White ethnic groups are viewed collectively as Black or people of colour, or in terms of gender, as men or women of colour.  These ascriptions subtly conflate the histories of all non-White groups into a single rainbow-like melting pot.  They also obscure the disparities and unevenness of ethnic oppressions, and the different relationships that minority groups have had with capitalism and Empire.  

The problematic that I refer to here as the medical model political classification system, in which a label of one size fits all, is evident in the struggles of women of African heritage [i.e. Black in the classical sense].  The politically [in]correct ascription of the nomenclature Black – as contemporarily applied to all non-White females – generalises their unique exploitation under different phases of capitalism.  For example, under the agrarian modes of nascent capitalism in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, Black women were classified by law as items of goods under the Navigation Acts.  This classification legally dehumanised the bodies of African women and men, whilst facilitating the exploitation and appropriation of their labour on the plantation fields.  However, as property under habeas corpus, additional dimensions to the oppression of Black women were rape and impregnation by their White owners.  As children automatically inherited the enslaved status of their mother under the British Black Codes and French Code Noir, the bodies of Black women were also used by their White European masters to biologically reproduce their slave labour force. 

The racial economic experiences and labour exploitation of Black and South Asian women have to some extent been similar, under the latent modes of industrial capitalism in the mid 20^th century.  Although culturally different, and defined by their colonialist and imperialist experiences of Empire, both groups of women were exploited as menial labourers in Britain’s declining manufacturing and production industries.  In the modern service sector, Black and South Asian females have become a reserve army of emotional labourers.  They are over-represented in cleaning and caring occupations, in which low-paid work is often performed under stressful conditions, with very little contractual rights.  However, the contemporary economic racial inequalities experienced by South Asian women are intersected by the additional dimension of their religious culture.  This makes their gendered labour-market experiences unique.

Throughout history, the general social and economic statuses of Black [in the classical sense] and South Asian women  have generally been lower than those of their White counterparts.  However, the application and acceptance of the term women of colour, reduces the unevenness of their patriarchal struggles to the level where they are represented – and generally perceived  – as being the same.  There is more harm than good, being done by the efforts of liberal pluralists, to be politically correct.  The term people of colour subtly suggests that White is not a colour, and in doing so normalises White as the default position, whilst homogenising historical racial, ethnic, gender and cultural differences, into a single collectivity.  WHAT DO YOU THINK?