Berkeley Prof: Enough With ‘People of Color’ Already!

The term, that is, not the people themselves. And it’s also time to dump “BIPOC,” argues Jerel Ezell, a UC Berkeley professor, in yesterday’s edition of Politico Magazine. Not only are these offensively reductive, Ezell argues, but clearly counter-productive … to Democrats, anyway. 

Ezell, who also runs an organization called the “Center for Cultural Humility,” diagnoses the insistence of Democrats in dividing the world between “white” and “not white” as one of their key failures in 2024. Despite their many arguments for “diversity,” the terms POC and BIPOC actively disregard the diverse populations that Democrats try to array against whites in America. And those voters are increasingly sick of it, Ezell argues, as well as the other labels that Academia-drenched elites keep trying to use:

Last month, in the televised moments leading up to President Donald Trump’s arrival at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda to be sworn in, CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King scanned the room and noted, “I do not see many ‘people of color.’” She and her co-host took another 20 seconds or so to point out a few attendees who fit the term.

The moment, predictably, triggered a backlash from conservative commentators, who accused King, who is Black and a journalist, of being preoccupied with race. But it was also a reminder of the awkward, clunky and frequently backward attempts by the left (or those perceived to be on the left) to, literally and figuratively, read the room. For years Democrats’ understanding of race has not only not evolved, it has arguably been in full-blown retrograde. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the party’s canned usage of the term “people of color.” …

In contemporary times, the expression “people of color” has been used to convey cultural connection among Black, Indigenous, Latino and Asian people, embellishing emotional solidarity and connection between the groups. It fully bloomed into the progressive lexicon during Barack Obama’s presidency. Sociologists, medical researchers, political pundits and the mainstream media now use the expression with complete abandon.

In contrast, Trump and Republicans have largely avoided using the expression — unless it’s a pointed attack at liberal “wokespeak” which also includes words like “Latinx.” And for good reason. The real people included in “people of color” manifest as distinctive cultures, as opposed to a unified sociopolitical demographic. (Furthermore, when a person references people of color, they’re often just really alluding to one or two races in the racial minority cluster — rarely are they alluding to each and every nonwhite population.)

Ironically, this is the same advice I gave to Republicans in my 2016 book Going Red. Republicans had also assumed that Hispanics were a monolithic bloc of voters — and to a certain extent also black voters, with somewhat better voting evidence. Hispanic voters aren’t a bloc at all, except to the extent that their heritage comes from Spanish-language countries and cultures where the language is main point of cohesion. 

First off, many Hispanic voters have roots in this country going back generations — further than either side of my own family, even — in places like Colorado and the interior West. In states like Florida and Virginia, the ‘bloc’ is comprised by people whose families originated from a variety of cultures, with a variety of community interests. In Florida especially, even the narrower Cuban ex-pat bloc is split between those who fled Castro (conservative) and Batista (less so). 

Just packing all of these groups into a single category is stupidly reductive. Assigning them a made-up label like “Latinx” is even more stupidly reductive. And rolling up all of these diverse communities with the also-diverse black and Asian communities as POCs or BIPOCs is insanely stupid and reductive. There is no better way to communicate indifference to particular needs and desires than to offer up generic labels that basically tell these voters that “you all look alike to us” — especially given the context of Democrats expecting them to act alike as well. 

Ezell’s essay is lengthy and well worth reading in full, but it never quite comes to grips with the “ambient racism” (his term) inherent in that stupid reductivism. To do so would be to notice the same stupid reductive qualities in DEI as practiced by the government and corporate America over the last two decades. Ezell wants Democrats to defend DEI, but DEI and CRT within educational curricula rely on the same offensive assumption that color and other immutable characteristics are the primary determination of either value or victimhood. That also ignores a wide variety of experiences in our culture, and its execution requires stupidly reductive policies and outcomes. And just as even the supposed beneficiaries of POC and BIPOC are revolting against that reductivism, everyone is revolting against the reductivism of DEI too.

Time to end it all, and instead progress to an America where those labels would be immaterial. That won’t be easy, but it will be a lot more rewarding than reconstructing DEI under replacement labels while still employing the divisive and paternalistic policies that voters have finally rejected.