Oy, that was an ugly misstep. It was foolish to try and label your identity something that makes everyone outside your group feel like you’re calling them dim.
But now some tiny group of people have started a really stupid meme campaign to relabel “white people” as “people of light”. I don’t think you can do that accurately, unless you’re so white you glow in the dark.
Anyway, I’ve put a few of their goofy memes below the fold if you want to laugh at them.
It seems this is actually an anti-marketing campaign by the tribe of trolls at one of the chans. I think the idea is to ridicule the label “people of color” by making up a not-very-equivalent term and inducing people to criticize it, so they can then turn around and likewise criticize minority groups. It’s obvious and not very effective.
But then, you’re not going to find very insightful people chumming the waters at 8chan.
Wow, speaking as someone who is so white I do actually glow, that’s really fucking stoopid.
While I’m not so much “white” as an off-beige.
I tend towards pink.
How about “wypeepo?”
….or just stick with “cracker”
So what is an antonym for “people of color”?
People of Pale
People of Washed-Out
People of Pastel
People of Monochrome
People of Minimum Setting On the Chroma Slider
???
Profit
If usage can be limited to the folks who brought us the word, “cucks,” I vote for the abbreviation “caucs.”
It’s not for me to say and it ultimately doesn’t matter to me
and I’ll use the preferred terminology but I don’t understand why people of color was selected. It just feels like a backwards colored people to me.
I’m sitting here trying to think of an fitting joke and just
there is none. It’s just stupid.
“People of Light” telescopes easily to “Plights.”
No, that sounds wrong. Wait, I’ve got it:
“Blights.”
Why not snowflakes? Captures both properties with just one word.
I prefer “person with hereditary chronic melanin deficiency”, as it properly reflects my tendency to burst into flames when exposed to direct sunlight.
I doubt it will take long for some racist to decide this is a Jewish plot to do…something.
@10 Saad: Works for me, though I’m sad to see the name pre-empted (once again): If I ever became a punk rocker, that was going to be my stage name.
Personally, I prefer “Honko-American”.
We are not white.
We are the people of various shades of pinkish tan.
We are also the people who sun burn easily and shouldn’t be living too close to the equator.
How about “Light and Delightsome” from the Book of Mormon.
Also, how swarthy can a person be and still qualify as a person of light? Do southern Italians, Greeks, Armenians etc.qualify? Are they people of filtered light?
“The Aristocrats”
What they should say is “We are not white, we are assholes”.
As a layman whose experience with bioluminescence is limited to a very few examples (chiefly fireflies a.k.a. lightning bugs, and some sort or another of tiny marine life occasionally encountered in sea surf or on wet sands near the waterline), I suppose there could be critters that glow white in the dark; but I’d guess tinted light would be cheaper and easier to produce. Any experts in the house?
Kip T.W. @ #9 — “Pllights. No that sounds wrong.” Sounds right to me: Plight — a dangerous, difficult, or otherwise unfortunate situation. But then “Bigots of Lights” could be “Blights.”
Mike Smith @ #7 — “feels like a backwards colored people” Bingo
“We are not ‘white’, we are people of light” beige.
There, I fixed it.
On the other hand, I’m not white, I’m translucent, especially in winter.
#translucentlivesmatter
And I looked, and behold a pale horse’s arse.
“The Sunburned”
But wight people crumble to dust when you expose them to the light…
And here I thought the reason we came up with People of Color as a term is because, historically, white people have considered being white to be a necessary precondition to being a person. Silly me. But now I have seen the light.
they’re the kind of light that causes cancer.
We are DEVO
The folks over at the root came up with the moniker mayosapiens. It’s perfect!
Lack of color makes me think “clear” or “transparent”, just like their motives.
I’d like to think that this could be simply laughed off and dismissed, but today, in Trump’s America, I won’t be at all surprised to see it gain traction.
I feel that I have to give Trump some credit. If not for his campaign, winning the Presidency, and subsequent actions, I might have continued to dismiss the blatant, proactive racism alive in this country as gnats buzzing around the periphery of our politics.
@Mike Smith,
The problem with using the past participle “colored” for people is that it implies that something was done to add that color to a colorless base; in other words, that white is the default. “People of color” doesn’t carry the same implication (and it’s also used more broadly, not just to refer to people of recent African descent).
But more to the point, if it’s the term preferred by the people it references, the rest of us should use it.
I think someone should explain, especially since “people of color” is primarily a US term, that the memes are totally wrong about the rationale for “people of color”. “People of color” is not the politically correct replacement for “Black people”. “Black people” is fine, and often necessary (see: “Black lives matter”). “People of color” is a broader term, basically referring to everyone except White, non-Latino, non-mixed people. If you say “people of color” when you’re really just talking about Black people, as an Asian American I will make a sad face.
interesting. “not very effective” yet it’s being talked about all over twitter, and was covered on Alex Jones yesterday: https://www.infowars.com/people-of-light-new-campaign-seeks-to-redefine-what-it-means-to-be-white/
Maybe there’s something here?
People of a Slightly Higher Albedo.
The overly pale skin, the dead eyes, the identical, creepy smiles…
These people look like the cast of a teenage vampire movie ten years down the line. “People of Light” would even work as a title.
What a Maroon @ #30
As you probably know, many of these people believe that god “colored” these people. They also tend to be lousy a conventional American English. Now I’m fixin’ to call into a meetin’, ya’ll have good time…ye hear.
robro,
Not cool making fun of people’s dialects.
@11: I like “person with hereditary chronic melanin deficiency” mostly because of the last word.
What is wrong with just saying “people”?
I’m actually surprised “people of colour” is still around at all. The term seems to me to reinforce the “default” vs. “other” distinction where “white” isn’t a salient skin colour, but anything non-white is. We usually try to avoid that sort of thing nowadays, right? “Non-white” seems more straightforward and descriptive.
Am I missing something? I’m not familiar with the history of the term.
Sorry, but I think Saad wins. “Snowflakes” it is.
@quatguy 38: That’s been how we did it for all the centuries that white people owned or looked down on everyone else. We were the default, and if you didn’t specify, then it meant us.
I think those days are over. If you’re going to specify anybody, then specify everybody. No race, gender, or religion gets to be the assumption.
“Snowflakes” is now the presumed leader with two votes in addition to the person suggesting it (who may be presumed to be in favor of the name). I hereby declare victory for Saad.
(As to belligerent/fragile status quo fanciers in comment sections, I have been calling them ‘soapbubbles’ for a little while now anyway.)
BTW I find “Brights” rather cute and it was (IIRR) fashioned after “Gays”, which of course makes everyone out of that group feel like a miserable bastard.
I usually identify as a creature of the night, or a denizen of the dark places. I would, however, be fine with being identified as a member of the “people of the fish belly.” In my case, it would be “person of the hairy fish belly.”
Zeppelin: “Non-whites” is deprecated because it’s strongly negatively-framed– it defines the people it names as the absence of the dominant trait, rather than one they posess. Of course PoC is still somewhat implicitly negative in the sense that you point out, but that’s unavoidable at some level– that’s how the social phenomenon being named works.
@6 Andrew David — that has a variety of permutations that would work. Yes, some of the obvious ones smack of homophobia, but that’s what make them so apt for the alt-right cuck crowd. Their obsession with BBC is, em, revealing.
@44: But wasn’t that the point? An average person from Iran isn’t actually any more similar to your average people from Thailand and Kenya than they are to your average person from France. The only reason to talk about them as one group is because they are all treated differently than white people. If you genuinely want positive categories, they are there – Iranian, Thai, Kenyan, and for that matter French.
I like HappyHead’s approach @11 – I have long thought of myself as melanin deficient, especially when I have to hide under a rock whenever the sun comes out lest I immediately begin to burn, and that is in the UK, where we don’t tend to get the highest temperatures or the most intense sunlight most of the time.
I do like maia160’s contribution @28, “Mayosapiens.” That is so fine! MiracleWhipsapiens, although more appropriate, is just too cumbersome.
All right, if you are looking for an antonym of “people of color” then find an antonym of “color”, unless you mean to dehumanize yourselves and find an antonym of “people”.
Hint: “light” is not an antonym of “color”. These two phenomenons are so intimately entwined I’d almost call them synonyms.
I’ve taken to calling myself and my comcolorics “pig-danes” since it covers both pigmentation and dietary niche.
Ah yes, I seem to remember this chan message board what was it called? White People? WP? So People of Light? … wait. POL?
Point at the trolls and laugh at their transparent horribleness and open bigotry.
=8)-DX
@41 Kip – The intent of my comment was to convey the idea that everyone should just be called “people”; including “people of colour” etc. We are all just “people” first and foremost.
EM Forster’s protagonist Fielding in A Passage To India blotted his copybook by describing himself as “pinko-grey”.
I’m neither proud of my colour nor ashamed of it. I didn’t choose it, and as anyone will tell you I’m not noted for aesthetic gumption. But I notice when, in local news reports, the suspect is described as “Asian”, “Black”, or Eastern European” in appearance. Only occasionally is “White” (or “white”) mentioned as a detail, it’s just assumed.
So it is exceptional when the suspect is a person of color?
That’s one implication of white privilege no one ever thought about.
quatguy, I don’t know you or your motives, but to me this is uncomfortably close to the reflex “ALL Lives Matter!” when someone has the temerity to suggest that (in the fact of continuing oppression, including unpunished murder) “Black Lives Matter.”
It might be a valid response if bigotry didn’t exist, but it does exist, and it feels like an attempt to make the debate stop so the privileged won’t be discomfited by it.
I self-identify as a Pasty-American. (Store in a cool, dry place, away from direct sunlight.)
Nentuaby: Thank you! I can see where they’re coming from.
Though I’m not sure I find the (grammatically) “negative” labelling particularly problematic — it seems more honest to the way the US racial caste system actually works. These people get lumped together not because they “have colour”, but because they don’t have the one “right” colour. POC really aren’t a group except in a purely negative definitional sense and in the minds of people too ignorant to tell them apart.
It’s like how I prefer to call people “non-Germans” rather than “foreigners”, even though the former is technically “negative” while the latter is “positive”. “Foreigner”, to me, implies that “being foreign” is an identity.
‘People of light’? Please. They haven’t seen the deep and impenetrable darkness of my heart.
In the meantime, you’re all welcome to join me in the potato cellar. As requested, cool and dry, no sunlight. And eyes… everywhere, eyes… Watching… Waiting… Growing…
…
Sorry, got a little carried away there. Bring a flashlight, in any case.
Unless, quite conveniently, you are a glowing person of light. In which case it might be best to repair to the nuclear containment facility, but since I don’t have one, the potato cellar it is.
@ rq, #58
The potato cellar!?! Yuck! There are bugs down there.
Tasty, tasty bugs…
There’s a fair point here. “White” skin is less white than pink, as others have pointed out. And chances are a solid majority of those pushing this have a great deal of hyper-fragile toxic masculinity. “Pink people” would target that nicely.
vucodlak
Exactly.
rq @ 58;
I take it is a ‘come for a place to hide your pallid, melanin depived flesh from the
burning orb of torment in the skysun, stay to be sacrificed to a horrifying, non-Euclidean Outer God’ kind of deal?Eh, still less painful than third degree sun burn…
Can’t be, I’m already a Person of Heavy.
The Infra-Reds
In heraldry, there are five colours — red, black, blue. green and purple — and two metals — yellow and white. We use “tincture” the way normal English uses “colour”, because “colour” specifically means the darker shades and metal means the lighter ones. The metals are so-called because of the romantic conceit that yellow is gold and white is silver, though actually painting your shield with metallic paint is a total rookie mistake.
Given that it’s generally the white people in the world who have more gold and silver than the People Of Colour, I think they (we) should be called the People Of Metal.
See? It’s not just the modern sciences that can provide an insight into this crap!
@65
People of metal could be misspelled as “people of mettle” indicating competence and determination – something that should be avoided.
“People of light” can also have negative connotations, such as lightweight.
Or we could change light to its adjective so I would call myself “lightly pigmented”, but I’m not really lightly pigmented everywhere – I’m more “mottled”.
I’m pretty sure if I tried to put on my old Reign in Blood or Among the Living tour shirts, I’d look like a grossly overstufffed sausage, but I’d still like to get in on this People of Metal thing if possible.
We don’t glow. It’s more the colour of fish meat. Shouldn’t we be the “People of Salmon”?
In the first picture up there,
the one with the seven-clone in their interning-at-a-law-office duds,
who is that blurred-out individual on the far left?
Is that a gun-shot wound to the chest?
@chigau:
Good question.
I think it looks a lot like a red light flashing to the beat of Pete Shelley’s HomoSapien.
That song spawned **so many giggles** at my elementary school.
The late Harry Golden (The Carolina Israelite) suggested the use of the word colorless. Perhaps:”The cast of the play consisted of both colored and colorless actors. ” . . . Suggestions?
jack16
Saganite @68
I’d be more “People of Herring”
Come to think of it, “decolored” would be evolutionarily accurate.
Gregory @62
I don’t know what you mean. That’s not an altar, that’s the old engraved stone dining table centrepiece, been in the family for mille… years. Potato?
I like People of the Blue Tracery, which is kind of pretty until you try to say POTBT.
Also, “snowflakes” made me grin sardonically and “behold a pale horse’s arse” made me laugh aloud.
lol I actually think that one argument made at the time was “actually” that creationists would logically become the “dims” (something I don’t entirely disagree with), if the movement called itself Brights. I still think it was an idiot decision, but apparently, no one listened to those who looked at the possible involvement with them who argued that it was a bad idea.
This is definitely a troll meme. I blame /pol/.
Smells exactly like the “#DropTheB” campaign that 4chan thought up and tried to promote a few weeks ago. Also, “People of Light” = pol, so it’s not exactly subtle.
I’d like to register a vote for “melanin deficient”, as I live under an ozone hole, and have genetically Scottish skintone. More melanin would seem to be eminently sensible.
As an aside, the mad-scientist husband has a plan to insert chloroplasts into human skin to see if we can photosynthesise. I’d put my hand up for green. Just got to get it past the ethics committee… :P
I sometimes use “person of pallor”. The problem is, people keep hearing “person of power”, no matter how carefully I pronounce the “L”s.
I count myself among “people who burn” or perhaps “melanin challenged.” On the bright side, I save lots of money on vitamin D supplements. If I stay in the shadows, I don’t spend all the extra cash on sunblock. (Or I can do the thing with my coat that Spike used to do on Buffy.)
I first heard “people of color” back in the 80s in college. It’s not my favorite phrase, but it’s really not about me. Isn’t it a little late to be making it into an issue?
78 @ck I’m afraid to ask about it but, what’s drop the b? I really don’t want to do a search.