Person of color

The term person of color (plural: people of color, persons of color; sometimes abbreviated POC) is used primarily in the United States to describe any person who is not white. The term encompasses all non-white peoples, emphasizing common experiences of systemic racism. The term may also be used with other collective categories of people such as communities of color, men of color, and women of color. The term is not equivalent in use to the term colored, which was previously used in the United States to refer to African Americans only.

The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style cites use of people of colour as far back as 1796, and, like colored, it was originally used in reference to people of mixed African and European descent. French colonists used the term gens de couleur ("people of color") to refer to people of mixed African and European descent who were freed from slavery in the Americas. In South Carolina and other parts of the Deep South, this term was used to distinguish between slaves who were mostly "black" or "negro" and free people who were primarily "mulatto" or "mixed race". After the American Civil War, colored was used as a label exclusively for black Americans, but the term eventually fell out of favor by the mid-20th century.

Although American activist Martin Luther King Jr. used the term Citizens of color in 1963, the phrase in its current meaning did not catch on until the late 1970s. In the late 20th century, the term person of color was introduced in the United States in order to counter the condescension implied by the terms non-white and minority, and racial justice activists in the U.S., influenced by radical theorists such as Frantz Fanon, popularized it at this time. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was in wide circulation. Both anti-racist activists and academics sought to move understandings of race beyond the black-white binary then prevalent.

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