Legal Commentary

At the risk of being gratuitously provocative, it occurs to me that the phrase "people of color" might be pernicious and misleading. Given that the suggestion will probably inspire ire among some readers, I make it tentatively. (Contrary to some academics, I regard pugilistic exchange at workshops and on blogs not as a sign of intellectual toughness but only as a symptom of over-compensating machismo. Real philosophers -- Socrates, for instance -- never play the tough guy with their opponents: they leave the eristic stuff for sophists like Thrasymachus).

So take what follows in the spirit intended -- as an effort to speculate rather than pick a fight.

Here's the news event that inspires my worry: Recent reports of South Africans' lynching, raping, and mudering foreigners -- mostly Zimbabweans but also Mozambicans and others -- in Johannesburg and Cape Town. There is nothing surprising about xenophobia when unemployment and crime are both high, as they are in South Africa. But, combined with Mbeki's bizarre refusal to condemn Mugabe's incipient theft of an election in Zimbabwe, this outbreak of violence suggests to me that the concept of "people of color" is a concept used by elites to create a racialized elite unity that has very little purchase among the laity. Mbeki's loyalty to Mugabe is based, it is often said, on the desire to maintain unity among former freedom fighters (and perhaps reenforce Mbeki's own claims to govern as a veteran of a liberation struggle). But this desire has not inspired any real sense of trans-African unity: It has become instead merely a talking point to keep a corrupt leader in power.

Generalizing from this observation, it occurs to me that "people of color" is what Vonnegut called a "granfalloon" -- a category that is intended to, but in reality does not, inspire real unity among the people to whom it applies. (Vonnegut uses the example of "Hoosier" to illustrate his term). Elites use the term -- in defiance of reality among non-elites -- to create a sense of racialized unity against a common enemy, in the manner of Carl Schmitt's "concept of the political." (There can be no "people of color" without some "colorless people": "Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are," as Schmitt would say).

The problem with a concept of racialized unity is that, among non-elites, the concept tends to fracture on more parochial lines. Just as there is no trans-African unity among ordinary Zimbabweans and South Africans, despite Mbeki's rhetoric about a common anti-Imperialist struggle, there also is no political unity among ordinary African-Americans, ordinary Mexican-Americans, ordinary Korean-Americans, etc., despite elite rhetoric about a racial coalition composed of "people of color." Instead, these groups often have racialized unities of their own, defined by mutual hostility towards each other (most famously, perhaps, in the strife between Korean shopkeepers and their mostly Black customers in Los Angeles).

Hannah Arendt once denounced the notion of the "Third World" as an empty concept. She was roundly criticized -- but, as usual, turned out to be correct. I think that the concept of "people of color" is equally empty -- and, to the extent that it encourages race thinking among the laity, much more pernicious. Purchasing cheap camaraderie with the notion of racialized unity might be playing with fire: It may be that, having encouraged "people of color" to think of themselves as a political group against "the colorless," it is hard to put on the brakes when sub-grouping of POC -- Blacks, Mexican-Americans, etc -- define themselves as political entities against their putative allies.

Whether there is such a trickle-down effect from elite racialized rhetoric to lay belief, I do not know. But such an effect seems non-trivially possible and, if present, unequivocally harmful. Hence, my worry about POC talk.