Quote Originally Posted by Rokke View Post
Going by the American use of the word, its generally accepted as a reclamation of the word “colored”, which had been used as an derogatory term for non-white people (predominantly those of african heritage, essentially separating them by degrees of skin tone) till the American Civil rights movement. It has nothing to do with light spectrums.

[IMG]
In american parlance, the descriptors for those of african decent has evolved over the decades. At one point in time, "colored" was not a derogotory term (the NAACP has it literally in their name), same with "negro". Over time, however, it was used more as a slur, and thus new descriptors were created over time to describe those of african decent.

The newer term of "People of Color" is, from what I have observed most frequently, not a means of reclaiming the word colored, but rather an all encompassing term to refer to non white groups (this being asian, hispanic, black, etc). Ive seen a few people argue that it is exclusively people who are of a specific skin tone, and would exclude white-hispanics, some asians with paler complexions, and whites.

Problem with the term "PoC" is that it is not used consistently among activist organizations and political groups. This is probably because what qualifies as 'brown/black' enough tends to get subjective to certain groups.

In any case, broadly speaking, not all these terms last long term. Afro-american and its derivation of African-American (or black-american in some communities), have had some pretty long standing usages fairly consistently as being fairly politically correct and inoffensive. Meaning, new terms get invented, but people over time keep going back to African American.