Member-only story
Don’t Call Me A Person of Color: I’m Black
A strange thing happens when you say the word “Black” as it pertains to race. People will often curl their lips up, as if you’ve said something distasteful or inappropriate; the color might drain from their faces in an expression akin to dread. The phrase “Black Lives Matter” triggers the knee jerk response of “All Lives Matter.” The FBI identifies those that fight for Black American rights as a terrorist group under the title of “Black Identity Extremists.” And. increasingly, “Black” is used interchangeably with “Person of Color,” POC, which ostensibly is much less racially charged. This is a strange and disturbing phenomenon, since Black is notsynonymous with POC: all Black people are persons of color, but all persons of color are not Black. And non-Black persons of color, or NBPOC, still benefit from and can practice anti-Black racism.
A recent example is Jordanian-American author Natasha Tynes, who is a non-Black person of color that regularly writes about the struggles of being a minority. She unsuccessfully tried to get a Black female Metro employee fired for eating on a train, and after tweeting rude remarks and a photo of the woman to the official Washington, D.C. Metro Twitter account, Tynes publisher dropped her book deal. The reasoning behind the drop was her perverse persecution of a Black woman when she quite literally writes about the struggle of being a WOC, and the hypocrisy of the fact that being a woman of color did not stop her from perpetuating anti-Black racism against a…
