Digital immigrant

Why should anybody want to define himself by what he is not? — William Safire

I recently received an email from Jason, one of my readers, who wanted to know what POC and WOC are. So I gave him a short explanation. And then I wrote that if he doesn’t know the terminology, I might have to do a post about the two acronymns’ meaning.

I remember my introduction to the term in 2006. I was on a date with an older guy who is a Kenyan expat. He called me a woman of colour. Something in the phrase made me uncomfortable. I have no idea what it could have been. But I didn’t like it and for that week I kept introducing myself to my friends as  –  “Hi, I am Joy-Mari Cloete and I am a woman of colour.” We thought it was funny.

Fastforward to 2009, only 3 years later, and I have done a 360° on this phrase. I now realise that the word black isn’t always descriptive of the majority of people in this world — many are something else: Creole, coloured, Jews, Latina/o, Indian, Native American, Aboriginal, Inuits. And the term ‘black’  has negative connotations in many parts of the world. So it makes sense to call myself a woman of colour instead of coloured when I’m speaking to my Canadian friend who flinches when she hears what she calls the C-word.

POC means either person of colour or people of colour, depending on the context. Similarly, WOC means woman of colour or women of colour, depending on the contex.

No-one can safely say when the term was first used, nor do linguists know who had used it first. But an 1818 pamphlet, ”Report of the Committee, to Whom was Referred the Memorial of the President and Board of Managers of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States.”, may be one of the earliest known usages of the term. French colonies have used gens de couleur liberes to speak of emancipated black people. And the oldest known usage is from 1781, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But I’ll be damned if I can find a credible link on that piece of information.

And yes, immigrants and refugees could be people of colour. The term has expanded since it first became en vogue in the late 20th century, when Frantz Fanon and Martin Luther King Jr used it.

Activists created it as a counterreaction to ‘non-white’. Why do white people [get to] set the standard? And we have to define ourselves on what we are not? But perhaps my initial dislike of the term stems from yet again being ‘othered’. White people are just that — white. They don’t seperate themselves into categories, as they did with people of colour: quadroon, mulatto, quintoon, octoroon, Eurasian.

I have incorporated the words into my vocabulary but am still more than a bit reluctant to call myself black, even though I can identify with Steven Biko’s definition of black as everyone who had suffered under Apartheid.