Articles That Include The Terms "Non-White" And/Or "Non-Black"

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post presents excerpts from four online articles that include the terms "non-white" and/or "non-black".

The content of this post is presented for socio-cultural and linguistic purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post. 

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SELECTED EXCERPTS
These excerpts are given in no particular order and are numbered for referencing purposes only.

Excerpt #1
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color
..."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.[16][17] 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",[18] and racial justice activists in the U.S., influenced by radical theorists such as Frantz Fanon, popularized it at this time.[19] By the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was in wide circulation.[19] Both anti-racist activists and academics sought to move the understanding of race beyond the black-white dichotomy then prevalent.[20]"...

-snip-
I added italics to highlight this sentence. Read my comment below about the statement that the terms "non-white" and "minority" implied condescension. 

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Excerpt #2
From http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/tkitao1/non-white.html
NON-WHITE
[written by] T. Kaori Kitao, 06.06.04
"People riding the New York subway are predominantly non-white. This is in part because elderly white women avoid subways as risky either being jostled or worse victimized and prefer riding buses. Still, all over in New York we see great many non-white faces, and this is probably true of most of our major cities in this country. To think of it, the population globally is certainly heavily non-white, and I am one of the world's non-whites.

Non-white refers to all but those who are ethnically white. This seems obvious, straightforward, and non-problematic. It is an officially sanctioned word that appears in all kinds of formal documents, like the census report and medical records. It is nevertheless a curious word, to say the least, and even more curious a concept. I dare say it is a tortured concept. I just don't get it; to me it is nonsensical.

 […]

…in its application to population at large, the term deals with a fixed entity, in this case, a demographic whole. That is how non-white is made into a term of exclusion. As a term of exclusion, non-white, unlike white, comprises a wide range of ethnic groups; and, therefore, it fails to define. It is a non-definable term. While white is slim in variation, non-white covers blacks and browns, the skin colors ranging from ebony to light tan with an enormous range of tones between them. These are definable colors familiar to cosmeticians in the names of make-up foundations: coffee, chocolate, carob, cocoa, mocha, cappuccino, mahogany, caramel, bronze, siena, sable, cinnamon, suntan, beige, honey, and so forth. One might add to these such pantyhose tints as chestnut, maroon, and taupe. White is a relatively fixed color; brown is wildly heterogenous.

… non-white is a term that defies the evidence of observation. It is not only illogical but also false and useless. One might as well speak of black and non-black as of white and non-white. But, better, if we were true to observation, while some blacks are black, ebony-colored blacks comprise a small minority among people categorized as blacks. Most blacks are brown -- in all ranges from dark to light. Anyone can check this out standing at a busy street corner downtown. Then, whites are not all white, and some whites are not quite so white. So, taxonomically, it may make more sense to speak of blacks, browns, and whites; and browns are the colors of the faces we encounter in our urban centers today. Those of us categorized as non-white are more accurately and definably brown; and we are the majority. In terms of skin colors, as opposed to designated ethnic names, blacks and whites are certainly minorities; they may be called non-brown.

A term of exclusion excludes. So, some may think that setting aside a heterogenous majority by a term of exclusion is inaccurate, somewhat insulting, and perhaps unjust. But it has a history. There were days when non-white represented a small minority so that exclusion in a sense made some sense. Non-whites were generally blacks; and if minority is miniscule it is essentially a rarity that can be perhaps considered negligible and legitimately left undefined. There are still today places in this country where non-whites are decidedly a minority; but this is no longer true in many other places and hardly true worldwide. The excluded minority, paradoxically, more often than not constitutes a majority

Ethnically, white of course means Caucasian; so, non-whites are non-Caucasians -- Africans, Asians, Native Americans, Polynesians, and Alaskan natives. But not all Caucasians are white. There are olive-skinned Italians, swarthy Hispanics, and brown Arabs. The New York Times reported not long ago (9 November 2003, "Nation") that Hispanics with both black and white ancestry are more and more refusing to identifying themselves as black or white but only as "other," having grown conscious of their Latino identity. Hispanics, we observe, cover a whole range of browns.

So, Caucasians may be as heterogeneous as non-Caucasians, after all. Moreover, there are whites who like to sport deep tans; they are, in fact, often darker than light-skinned African-Americans and fair-complexioned Asians but they can never be non-white. A college friend from Nigeria in my first year in America wrily commented one day: "Those white Americans . . . they discriminate against blacks but lie in the sun and try so hard to get dark." So, we have light-skinned non-whites and brown whites aside from non-classifiable Hispanics. We have been witnessing increased Hispanic immigration from the Caribbeans, Mexico, and South America in these decades; we have also been seeing not only more interracial marriages as witnessed in the social pages of daily newspapers but also their offsprings that have been christened Generation E.A., i.e., Ethnically Ambiguous, lately sought after in Madison Avenue campaigns (New York Times, 28 December 2003, "Sunday Styles"). It is obviously more and more evident that ethnic constitution is a continuum and cannot be easily divided into categories.

A new term for non-white came informally into currency some decades ago that skirted around the sense of exclusion. We, non-whites, were designated people of color, appropriating the euphemism for black and expanding its sense. So, we now have people of color, some of whom are colored people; logically, then, white people are non-color or colorless people. It is simpler, if we have to categorize, to set browns apart from whites and blacks. But in the era of ethnic continuum, it will be more and more ridiculous to impose categories and useless, too.

In the liberal arts college where I started teaching in 1966 there was besides myself only one other non-white on the faculty of some one hundred and fifty, and we were both Asians. This fairly represented the demography of the student body. Today, the college provides on its admission form the following subcategories for Non-White: Asian/Asian American, Hispanic/Latino, Black, Native American, Bi-/Multiracial. This is followed by White and then Other.

Times have changed. But words do stay and continue to elude and delude us by distorting our perception of the world as it is. As one who studies visual arts, I am naturally partial to taking observed data as they come. Look, blackbirds are brown."...
-snip-
I want to call attention to this sentence in this 2004 article that "One might as well speak of black and non-black as of white and non-white".

That sentence suggests that the term "non-black" wasn't used that often in 2004. Although the term "non-black" might have been used in 2004 or even before that time, my sense is that "non-black" is a very new referent in verbal or print, or at least it wasn't frequently used in written or verbal form before around 2015 or so. 

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Excerpt #3
From https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/white-vs-non-white-or-black-vs-non-black-mark-krikorian/ White vs. Non-White, or Black vs. Non-Black?

written by Mark Krikorian, March 23, 2012
"You can almost taste the disappointment and perplexity of reporters that the Trayvon Martin shooter, George Zimmerman, isn’t some caricature from Deliverance. The New York Times saw the need to describe his as “a white Hispanic,” a term which a Nexis search shows has only been used five times previously in the entire history of the paper. Robert VerBruggen noted here yesterday, “if a plain-vanilla white guy shot Zimmerman, he’d be considered just ‘Hispanic.’” But that’s an artifact of elite media prejudices and government race laws, not social reality.

That’s because the meaningful social divide in our country is — and always has been — not white/non-white but black/non-black. Everyone on the non-black side of that divide eventually becomes part of the majority population, starting with Quakers in New England (who, despite being English Protestants, were the wrong kind of English Protestants), then non-English Protestants, then northern European Catholics, then southern and eastern Europeans, then people of Middle Eastern origin (my cousin once owned a house in D.C. that had a restrictive covenant against Armenians, and now she’s an “Anglo”!), and, eventually, people of Latin and Asian ancestry.

The ultimate yardstick for this process is intermarriage, and Zimmerman exemplifies that. The fact that his father is what we today call “white” and his mother is Peruvian (though ethnically that could mean anything, since Peru is a “nation of immigrants” too) only became relevant in the context of the shooting — otherwise, it was irrelevant, except where our ridiculous race laws make it so (checking a box in a college admissions form, for instance). There’s a reason that, even in the 60s, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner didn’t feature a white girl bringing home her Indian or Brazilian fiance. Was Ricky and Lucy having a child even remotely comparable to television’s first interracial kiss? (Take that Kathryn!) Of course not. There are dozens of kids in my boys’ schools who are half Asian and half white and no one even imagines them to be “biracial,” whereas I know two boys with black fathers who are considered biracial (and, further, one has an Asian mother, the other a white one).

It’s the black/non-black divide in our society that we must keep struggling to overcome, so that ethnicity loses its political saliency and becomes a purely voluntary matter, and ultimately becomes a matter simply of genealogy, with all of today’s Americans sharing the same great-grandchildren. But mass immigration interferes with that process, both by slowing intermarriage of recent immigrant groups and by introducing yet more groups that will climb over the backs of black Americans to enter the mainstream. Frederick Douglass’s observation on this is as valid today as when he wrote it in 1853: “Every hour sees the black man elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived emigrant, whose hunger and whose color are thought to give him a better title to the place.”
-snip-
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_Who%27s_Coming_to_Dinner
“ “Guess Who's Coming to Dinner” is a 1967 American comedy-drama film produced and directed by Stanley Kramer, and written by William Rose. It stars Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, and Katharine Hepburn, and features Hepburn's niece Katharine Houghton.

The film was one of the few films of the time to depict an interracial marriage in a positive light, as interracial marriage historically had been illegal in most states of the United States. It was still illegal in 17 states—mostly Southern states—until June 12, 1967, six months before the film was released. Roughly two weeks after Tracy filmed his final scene (and two days after his death), anti-miscegenation laws were struck down by the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia.
-snip-
“Take that Kathryn” probably refers to actress Kathryn Hepburn (for the role she played in that movie.)

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Excerpt #4
From https://www.dosomething.org/us/articles/our-role-as-non-black-people-of-color-in-disrupting-racism
NON-BLACK PEOPLE OF COLOR NEED TO START HAVING CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THE ANTI-BLACKNESS IN OUR COMMUNITIES

A guide to starting anti-racist conversations with friends and family.

Sharon Park [no date given; retrieved Feb. 1, 2021]
“To all non-Black people of color — it’s time we speak up against the anti-Blackness in our communities.

This guide is written to serve as a starting point for how non-Black people of color can engage in conversation regarding the anti-Blackness within our respective communities. A disclaimer: the term “people of color” (POC) encompasses people of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. We acknowledge and think actively about how each of these individual communities distinctly experience racism: Asian, Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, Pacific Islander, and multiracial.

I identify as Asian and have consulted the other folks in DoSomething’s POCI affinity group, which is comprised mostly of people who identify as Asian and Latinx. This is a guide for non-Black POC to stand in one form of solidarity with our Black community by tackling our anti-Blackness — but a one-size-fits-all approach does not work and we don’t presume to speak for all Asian people, all Latinx people, or all non-Black people of color. We also acknowledge that anti-racist conversations do not center Black people, and real action is needed to uplift the Black community. As advocates for racial justice and as imperfect allies, we’re sharing this guide in the hopes that it helps some of you broach needed conversations with your loved ones.

LEARN MORE

Living as non-white people in America, we are faced with varying instances of discrimination across our different identities every day. There is a thread of shared experiences of oppression which runs through all people of color. But as non-Black people of color, it's vital to recognize that being Black in America is not the same as being any other race in America.

The internalized racism and anti-Blackness within each of our individual communities have long perpetuated white supremacy and the continued violence against the Black community. As non-Black people of color we too often settle into a harmful neutral territory when it comes to Black lives. To stand in solidarity with our Black community means we must be actively anti-racist and not simply “not racist” — to stop brushing aside the anti-Blackness many of us have learned and been complicit to within our respective communities.

We've heard and excused it too often in our circles, with our friends & family: it's just how they are, they're old anyway, they're just joking, they had this one experience, they didn't mean it like that, they don't know better, it's not worth it. We need to do better and having direct and honest conversation is a start.”…
-snip-
This is just one example of  a number of online articles written in 2020 and 2021 that include "non-Black People of Color" in their title.

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