People of a certain age and background will fondly recall the satirical British magazine Punch (1841–2002). I used to enjoy reading it growing up in India. One of its many entertaining features was a cartoon from the early-twentieth century with no caption. Readers were invited to submit a contemporary caption. The winning entry would be published in a subsequent issue, along with the missing information on issue of original publication and the caption accompanying the cartoon. I recall being especially amused by one in which a British society hostess introduces an African guest to an Indian with the exhortation, ‘You must have a lot in common, you are both natives.’

I am reminded of that cartoon every time I come across the phrase ‘people of colour’ (POC), an ugly American import. It’s racially offensive in privileging whiteness, implying there’s white folk and all the rest are afterthought also-rans. The reference point is white and POC is a portmanteau category to catch all non-whites into one collective grouping. The origins of the phrase are rooted in apartheid in South Africa and slavery in the US. In South Africa, ‘coloured’ was originally used as a social category to describe people who were neither white nor black racially and occupied an intermediate status between them socially. The arbitrary classification relied on physical features like skin colour, family background and cultural practices. Most coloureds were Christian, spoke Afrikaans and English and affiliated with whites. They mainly worked in the professional middle, and skilled working class occupations. Intermarriage was common between whites and lighter-skinned coloureds. Restrictive apartheid laws after 1948 prohibited interracial marriage and sexual relations, limited occupational opportunities and disenfranchised many coloureds. From 1950 to 1991 ‘coloured’ was a legal category to denote people of mixed European and black African or Asian ancestry. It was also an accepted term in Britain until the 1960s for black, Asian and mixed race people. The designation and all restrictions associated with it were abolished in South Africa as apartheid was progressively dismantled in the 1990s.

‘Person of colour’ is specifically an American coinage. Some trace its ancestry to the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston as a follow-up to the UN’s International Women’s Year in 1975. The Americans came up with ‘women of colour’ to capture and articulate the sense of solidarity among native American, blacks, Latina, Asian and Pacific Islander women. The thing that supposedly united the disparate groups was their oppression by whites. It was more a sociological construct than a biological classification, a political designation that implies systemic racism and white supremacy. Civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. referred to ‘citizens of color’ in his great ‘I have a dream’ speech at the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963. According to an analysis for National Public Radio by Kee Malesky in 2014, the previously favoured term ‘coloured’ peaked around 1970 followed by ‘minorities’ that peaked around 1997. An Act from 1807 to prohibit the importation of slaves into the US clarified that the law applied to ‘any negro, mulatto, or person of colour’, meaning people with a mixed white-black ancestry. Malesky noted that the word ‘colour’ in this context is ‘packed with history, prejudice and confusion’, describing ‘someone’s complexion as an indication of race or ethnicity’.

The specific American and historical origin of the terminology explains the hesitancy and ambivalence that many of us feel about the applicability of POC to ourselves. Even in the US context from which the phrase originates, the vast disparity in relational experiences of the different groups with whites cannot be subsumed into one catch-all category. It centres whiteness, frames all other identities in relation to whites, implicitly holds whiteness to be the race-neutral norm and marginalises the rest. ‘POC’ dilutes both the historical specificity of chattel slavery and the contemporary specificity of black struggles. This is what Joe Biden meant in the presidential campaign when he told radio host ‘Charlamagne tha God’ in May 2020: ‘If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.’ The British analogue of that was Labour MP Dawn Butler mocking Kemi Badenoch as ‘white supremacy in blackface’ and attacking her election as Tory leader as a ‘victory for racism’. In reality we are not a monolithic cohort and Caucasians are a small fraction of the world population. We prefer to engage with the race-colour spectrum on our own terms and are indifferent to the potential outrage among white wokerati at our rejection of the POC label.

Damon Young, author of the book What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker, argued in 2020 that the phrase POC ‘needs to die’. Hence too Tolani Shoneye’s complaint in the Independent on 19 May 2020: ‘As a black woman, I hate the term “people of colour”.’ This explains the emergence of ‘black and indigenous people of color’ as a separate category.

The same criticism would apply to subsuming Aboriginal Australians into POC. Imported into Australia, POC doesn’t so much ‘homogenise’ our different civilisational and geographical origins, cultures, religions, classes, experiences and aspirations into either an analytically useful or politically mobilising category. Rather, it is much more powerful as a tool to deny us our separate identity and agency within ‘Australian’ as the umbrella category that we all share. That is, to my mind, divisive more than unifying. It is exclusionary, tantamount to ‘othering’ us. It’s also factually wrong. Caucasians are not ‘people of no colour’.

This monologue of uncertain origins makes the point to wicked effect. Variously attributed by different people to Josh White, an unidentified ‘African child’, Malcolm X, or the Oglala Lakota, it may instead be a translation from a French poem by Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first president of Senegal (1960-1980). ‘When I was born, I was black. When I grew up, I was black. When I go in the sun, I am black. When I am cold, I am black. When I am scared, I am black. When I am sick, I am black. And when I die, I will still be black. You white people. When you are born, you are pink. When you grow up, you are white. When you go in the sun, you turn red. When you are cold, you turn blue. When you are scared, you turn yellow. When you are sick, you go green. When you get bruised, you turn purple. And when you die, you look grey. So who you calling coloured?’

Read my lips. I am not a person of colour. If you want to define me by race, ethnicity or religion, call me Indian, Asian or Hindu; by colour, call me brown. That’s who I am. Calling me a POC denies my heritage and undermines my identity as an Australian of Indian origin. It offends and disrespects me. Similarly the 197-page Casey Report on the UK’s grooming gangs scandal incenses me by using the word ‘Asian’ 114 times, Pakistani 45 times, and Muslim 19 times. Such cowardice of the political class and commentariat stigmatises and maligns all British Asians when the data on prosecutions and convictions show Muslims males of Pakistani heritage to be the problem demographic.