What Do You Call People Who Aren’t White?

“Marginalized.” “Minoritized.” “Racial/ethnic minorities.” “Underserved.” “People of color.” “Global majority.” For as long as we’ve been talking about race in our societies, one particular concept has eluded easy and consistent definition: what we call the collective groups in our societies that are not of the dominant racial group. Within this article, I’ll focus on societies and organizations where that dominant racial group is “White.” If your context is different, replace “White” with the relevant racial/ethnic group (e.g., “Han Chinese”).

As a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion practitioner and organizational strategist, the confusion around the right terms to use is familiar to me — it’s a common frustration of my clients. Some will look up the “most inclusive term,” nod their head at an article online, and yet get immediately called out when using the term in practice. Some will take the lead of a well-known speaker and use the terms that they use, only to face criticism for having used the wrong word for the context.

When they all, inevitably, ask me “what do I call people who aren’t White?” I can tell that they’re looking for an easy answer, one magical word that once said will earn them a reputation as leaders and organizations that “get it.”

There isn’t one. No one word or phrase speaks to the lived experiences of all the groups it describes, makes sense in all contexts, avoids problematic associations or implications, is accessible enough to use in everyday speech, and can be deployed at scale without requiring significant amounts of education and persuasion.

But what we do have are many words that have emerged throughout the years to describe these groups, each one taking a different angle on a complex concept. They are each imperfect as “universal” terms, but that doesn’t mean they’re without value. My perspective is this: mindful communicators should be using a plurality of different words to discuss the collective of non-White* groups across different contexts, and selecting the right word for the occasion — rather than attempting to find any single one word that does everything.

To understand why, we need to both understand the many words that developed over time, and the reasons behind the ever-proliferating list of “inclusive” terminology. I’ll center this conversation on the United States, as much of our racial rhetoric for better or worse is exported out into other contexts or used as the template for “global” terminology.

A History of Changing Language

The terms that we have used to describe “people who aren’t White” have changed as a response or in parallel to social movements, attitude shifts, intergroup relations, and demographic trends over time. Terms that may have initially carried positive connotations may attract more negative or problematic connotations over time, fall in popularity, and be replaced with newer terms — a process that linguists call pejoration. Understanding the history of changing language allows us to track how we’ve come by the terms we use today, not just for race, but for many social constructs.

From the American Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement

One of the first words that emerged to describe people who weren’t White was “Colored,” a term that described freed Black slaves and in certain contexts — like in the United States Colored Troops — Native American soldiers fighting alongside them for the Union in the American Civil War.

Following the Civil War, as former slaveowner interests moved to oppose and undermine Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation developed to maintain the social and political power of White people. By law and by custom, “Colored” became a marker that applied to Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos to exclude them from White society. If “Colored” was more explicit and expansive in its use, it was to better encompass the plurality of peoples who should be denied the same access to society and standard of life as White people.

“Colored” was most prominent throughout Reconstruction and at the height of Jim Crow segregation, from the 1860s to the mid-1900s. But as America’s racial diversity increased from Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino immigration and Mexican immigration from the Bracero program, new terms were sought out to supplement existing terminology.

One of these terms was “nonwhite,” a term that was used broadly in the US Census and in academic research to simply describe all groups that weren’t White. As public sentiment turned against usage of the word “Colored” due to its associations with Jim Crow segregation, “nonwhite” quickly gained prominence as an alternative — so much so that on the eve of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, “nonwhite” far dwarfed “Colored,” at least in written literature (see Figure 1).

The Civil Rights Movement and Beyond

This article will not document the many events and achievements of the Civil Rights Movement in full. However, when it comes to language, it’s worth noting that the increased racial awareness preceding, during, and following the Civil Rights movement had dramatic effects on the language used to describe the increasingly diverse American population.

New identity coalitions emerged, like “Asian American,” a political term denoting solidarity across Chinese American, Japanese American, Korean American, and many other groups from the Asian diaspora. Similarly, the American Indian Movement brought together many Native American peoples under a common political banner.

“Colored people” and “nonwhite” would both come under attack from newly politicized and empowered groups: “Colored people” for its ties to Jim Crow, and “nonwhite” for centering Whiteness, lumping many different racial groups together, and frankly, for being a term assigned onto racial groups rather than self-determined. As the usage of both these terms began to decline, alternatives abounded — many, many alternatives.

“Racial minorities” highlighted the discrimination different racial groups received as a result of their minority status.

“Oppressed people(s)” highlighted the shared experiences of discrimination, subjugation, and oppression that different racial groups faced.

“Women of color” (later, “people of color”) highlighted new bonds of racial solidarity across racial groups, and was coined at a conference where Black, Asian American, and Native American women came together to advance a shared political agenda.

These terms all aimed to capture similar sentiments, and fill the voids left by “Colored,” in particular. However, one new term would catch on that embodied many activists’ political focus of the time of ensuring greater visibility and representation: “underrepresented.” Rising from the rest of the pack, “underrepresented” overtook “nonwhite” in the 1980s, and continued to increase in usage. The other terms, as shown in Figure 2, had yet to gain much popularity— only barely beating out “Colored people” in literary usage and not yet coming close to replacing the far-diminished usage of “nonwhite.”

The 2000s Onward

“Underrepresented” wouldn’t be the only replacement for “Colored.” In 1985, one of the new terms, “people of color,” began surging ahead of the rest. It overtook “nonwhite” in the early 1990s, and continued gaining prominence as racial justice advocates popularized the term given its connotations of solidarity.

As narrated by Black feminist activist Loretta Ross, this solidarity was clearly different from the “biological” designations of racial difference still common at the time.

[The Black, Asian American, and Native American activists who coined the term] didn’t see it as a biological designation — you’re born Asian, you’re born Black…whatever — but…a solidarity definition, a commitment to work in collaboration with other oppressed women of color who have been “minoritized.”

As Salvador Vidal-Ortiz frames in the Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity and Society:

“People of color explicitly suggests a social relationship among racial and ethnic minority groups. … [It is] is a term most often used outside of traditional academic circles, often infused by activist frameworks, but it is slowly replacing terms such as racial and ethnic minorities. … In the United States in particular, there is a trajectory to the term — from more derogatory terms such as negroes, to colored, to people of color. … People of color is, however it is viewed, a political term, but it is also a term that allows for a more complex set of identity for the individual — a relational one that is in constant flux.””

Of note is that a similar term arose in the UK as a result of anti-racist organizing in the same time period: “BME,” or “Black and Minority Ethnic.” The term later evolved into “BAME,” or “Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic,” to include people of Asian descent. Like “people of color,” “BAME” was similarly founded with similar ideals of inter-group solidarity between people of different races.

Not long after the rise of “people of color” came another word that rapidly rose to prominence: “racialized.” A term popularized by race theorists and academics, it referred to the outcome when a group of people become seen as members of a discrete “race” over time. It centers the idea that race is socially constructed, that racial categories are far from mutually exclusive or rooted in any biological reality, and that so long as groups are seen as members of a race — often imposed upon them by a dominant racial group — that they will for all intents and purposes be members of that race.

Collectively, “people of color” and “racialized” became increasingly normalized as commonly used terms among the general public and academia, respectively, to refer to people who were not White. While “underrepresented” didn’t disappear, its frontrunner status quickly dropped as more widely-applicable terms gained ground. “People of color” became more frequently used in the late 1990s, and “racialized” did the same in 2005 — surpassing even “people of color” in the early 2010s (Figure 3).

The Roots of Discontent

“Well,” you might say after looking at this data. “It seems like we have our answer: ‘racialized’ and ‘people of color.’”

But it’s not that easy. To begin with, “racialized,” while prominent in sociology and other fields within academia, is far less common in the general lexicon. And “people of color” has had no shortage of critiques. In the last decade alone, a plethora of new terminology has emerged. In some cases, terms have been modified — like the proposed replacement of “people of color” (POC) with “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color” (BIPOC), or the addition of “historically” to existing terminology to make “historically oppressed,” “historically marginalized,” or “historically underrepresented.” In other cases, new terms have emerged altogether, like “global majority,” “underserved,” or “underestimated,” and some emerging practices eschew a single label altogether, choosing to list out every race to eliminate ambiguity. These alternatives and challenges are often inspired by valid critiques of the predominant language of the times. If we want to future-proof our inclusive terminology and develop a pragmatic language of inclusion that meets all of our needs, we need to trace back the roots of our discontent.

The Cooptation of Solidarity

“People of color” had a solidly radical, grassroots origin in the racial advocacy work of Black, Native American, Latino, and Asian American activists. But as it entered the mainstream in the late 1900s, the nuances of its meaning were slowly stripped away. Its original connotation, a political designation of solidarity between racial groups to oppose White supremacy, became watered down until the term meant little more than “an umbrella term for people who are not White.”

It became possible to point at large swaths of Black and Asian and Latine** and Indigenous people and name them all “people of color,” even if they didn’t even know each other, let alone worked in anything resembling racial solidarity. It became possible to point at a single person of any race that wasn’t White and call them a “person of color,” even if they had no relationship with racial solidarity work or a politicized racial identity to begin with.

In other words, as “people of color” gained prominence, it lost its original meaning — and thus became increasingly wielded as a tool to do harm.

When companies say “we have 60% people of color in our workforce” or “we want to focus on serving people of color” today, for example, they are most certainly not speaking about political movements of racial solidarity, or racially-diverse coalitions working in each other’s interests. They’re simply saying, “60% of our workforce is not White” and “we want to focus on serving people who are not White.”

This usage of the term is vague, opaque, and unactionable. If 60% of a workforce is “not White,” does that mean 15% are Black, 10% are Asian American, 25% are Latine, and 10% are Native American? Or does it mean that 55% are Asian American, most of those highly-educated East or South Asian immigrants or their children, and the other groups get to fight for the remaining 5%? Using “people of color” as a broad umbrella term in these contexts obfuscates these facts, and can impede both transparency and accountability.

It gets worse when “person of color” is used to label a single person as “not White.” It erases their racial identity, flattens their humanity, and assigns them a label bereft of meaning that for many, can feel no better than being called “Colored” under Jim Crow.

The commonly proposed replacement for “person of color,” “BIPOC,” or “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color,” doesn’t fare any better. This new term aimed to refocus the term onto what advocates felt like were the people most impacted by White supremacy: Black people impacted by racism, and Indigenous (or Native American) people impacted by colonialism. By explicitly naming these groups and putting forth a new acronym, advocates hoped to force a shift in outcomes with a shift in language. But simply changing “POC” to “BIPOC” doesn’t change the reality that the language had been coopted and twisted from “self-determined solidarity” to “dehumanizing umbrella terminology that centers Whiteness.”

Searching for Untainted Alternatives

That “people of color” has been coopted and diluted into an umbrella term is far from a controversial opinion. These days, it’s one of the most common critiques I hear. And so, even as the term continues to see heavy usage in the mainstream, I am seeing in real time a vigorous search for new alternatives that lack the tainted implications of “people of color” and its cousins.

“People of the global majority” aims to flip the script of “racial minority,” pointing out that non-White peoples make up a large majority of the world’s population.

“Historically oppressed/marginalized groups” aims to embed flexibility of context, centering the experience of having received oppression. Often, this term is deployed with additional implications that while many groups were historically oppressed, there are a few groups whose oppression became the template for oppression against all other groups — in the U.S. racial context, Black people and Indigenous people.

“Underserved populations” refer to those populations that face barriers in access to services or wellbeing, especially in healthcare.

And so on and so forth, with “disadvantaged races,” “underestimated people,” and many more alternatives cropping up that advocates are trying on for size.

Skepticism Breeds Separatism

A formerly “inclusive” word coopted and misused by powerful interests has done real harm, and people are beginning to search for alternatives. This doesn’t surprise me — the same thing happened as a backlash to “Colored” following Jim Crow. But what does surprise me are just how many people are responding to the cooptation of “people of color” by denouncing labels referring to different racial groups in the collective altogether. Enough with the games, they argue, it’s time we do away with any term that doesn’t name explicitly what it’s describing.

These advocates are often responding out of exasperation that institutions and organizations are willing to say “people of color” or even “BIPOC” but not name a person “Black” or “Native American.” Rather than come up with new terms that might be coopted, they exhort other advocates to refer to communities with exactly the terminologies they use for themselves, and to string existing terms together when multiple groups must be referred.

A group with Black people and Latine people should be referred to as “a group with Black people and Latine people.” A coalition led by Asian American, Indigenous, Black, and Latine people is “a coalition led by Asian American, Indigenous, Black, and Latine people.”

A not-insignificant proportion of people talking about race prefer this approach — according to an informal poll I conducted on LinkedIn, one out of seven respondents preferred to list out the name of every relevant racial group in a context. (The same poll, interestingly enough, supported the continuing popularity of “POC” and its most common alteration, “BIPOC,” as well as the relative unpopularity of “racial minorities,” as of early 2022.)

Breaking the Cycle

You might at this point feel a little overwhelmed at the complexity of these terms, and have more questions than answers.

“Is ‘person of color’ even appropriate, anymore?”

“How should I know what alternatives to use?”

“How can I possibly learn enough to know what terms are ‘most inclusive?’”

“If I’m listing every racial group, how do I know when to end?”

As I navigated these contradictions, one important observation stood out most: the language we use has never inherently been “good” or “bad,” but when deployed to flatten racial difference, obfuscate challenges affecting certain racial groups more than others, and avoid naming the problems that need to be solved, any terminology becomes tainted by association over time. So long as the underlying problems remain with how we use racial language, new terms will cycle through forever — a phenomenon dubbed the “Euphemism Treadmill.”

With this in mind, I developed a style guide for my own use. It aims to take a pragmatic approach to language, using the terminology already common in our lexicon but augmenting it with guidelines heavily informed by the spirit of the many alternatives that have proliferated. Ideally, it will be able to incorporate new developments in language without requiring complete revision, and help us break out of the cycle of adoption, distrust, and reinvention that so stymies conversations about race.

You are welcome to share and distribute this style guide and article, with attribution, if you find it useful.

A Pragmatic Style Guide to Talk About Race

When talking about individuals:

• Always use the highest degree of specificity shared publicly by that individual by default. If racial information is not known, not shared publicly, not salient in the situation and/or if otherwise requested to do so by the individual, omit racial information.
• Ex: “My spouse is Japanese American.” “My teacher last quarter was Indigenous.” “My best friend and I went to the beach.”
• In addition to the above guidance, different terminology can be used for individuals if the individual themself requests it. Ensure that individuals are not described with terms they do not request.
• Ex: “A colleague of mine stronger identifies with ‘person of color.’ As such, I will refer to them as a person of color.”

When talking about a group of individuals belonging to the same racial group:

• Always use the highest degree of specificity that applies to all members of that group by default. If racial information is not salient in the situation, omit racial information.
• Ex: “The Black Employee Resource Group is leading an event next week.” “I spoke to people from across the Asian diaspora about their thoughts on the incident.” “We interviewed members of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe for this focus group.”
• Take care not to insinuate or imply that groups of individuals represent their entire racial group.

When talking about a group of individuals belonging to different racial groups:

• Follow the guidance for individuals, UNLESS the group has requested a different label be used (e.g., “People of Color***.”). If racial information is not salient in the situation, omit racial information.
• Ex: “The Employee Council, containing Black, Latine, Indigenous, and Mixed Race members, put out a statement.”
• Ex: “The DEI Council, a joint collective of People of Color, put out a statement.

When talking about the full population of a single racial group in a given environment:

• Refer to that racial group with the most inclusive label that describes all its members.
• If individuals from that group must be referred to in the same environment, follow the guidance above.
• Ex: “Asian and Asian American students have similar shared experiences in this department. Ji-Hye, a Korean American third-year, noted that…”

When talking about the full populations of 2 or more racial groups in a given environment:

• Specify the names of all racial groups with the most inclusive labels that describe all their members, the first time these groups are mentioned.
• Where additional terminology adds useful context, use context-appropriate terms like “underrepresented” within discussions of demographics and representation, “underserved” within discussions of access to services or care, “underresourced” within discussions of access to resources or support, and so on to describe the collective racial groups. For every one of these terms, define at first use by listing out all referenced groups.
• Ex: “In our company, we have a large proportion of White, East Asian, and South Asian employees. Underrepresented groups include Black, Latine, Indigenous, Southeast Asian, West Asian, and Mixed Race employees. These underrepresented groups are the focus of our hiring and retention efforts.”
• Where no additional context is easily added and multiple groups must be described, use terms like “(historically) marginalized” (if marginalization is the focus) “People of Color / Black, Indigenous, and People of Color” (if solidarity is the focus), or even “non-White” (if no focus) but reference them the minimum amount possible; prioritize disaggregating into more specific categories. Define at first use by listing out all referenced groups.
• Ex: “In our society, many racial and ethnic groups have experienced historical marginalization, including Black people, Latin Americans, members of the Asian diaspora, West Asian / Middle Eastern / North African people, and Mixed or Multiracial people. The varied experienced of these marginalized groups shed light on how inequity functions in our society. For Black people…”
• Ex: “In our sample, White participants on average had substantially different experiences than those of non-White participants (non-White participants in our sample self-identified as belonging to races/ethnicities other than “White,” including ‘Latino,’ ‘Desi,’ and ‘Arab.’)”

Questions to Ask Yourself

With this resource, the question should shift from “what word is ‘best?’” to “which word is best for my context?” To answer that, explore the following questions.

1. Is race salient in this communication? Is it important to stakeholders that race/ethnicity be acknowledged here?
2. Is this communication about an individual, a group, or a population?
3. If a group or population, do all members see themselves as members of the same racial/ethnic group, or multiple?
4. Does the communication have a specific focus, like representation, wellbeing, or access to resources? If so, does any race-related terminology already exist to support those goals?
5. Do all racial/ethnic groups experience the topic of the communication in the same way? If not, how does the communication name and acknowledge these differences?
6. What is the impact of all racial terminology used on stakeholders? Are there unintended consequences or responses of the communication, and if so, what changes need to be made to future communications?

• *I use “non-White” instead of “nonwhite,” capitalizing “White” in an effort to recognize that White people should be racialized if other races are as well, rather than remaining unmarked and un-demarcated.
• **I use “Latine” (pronounced Lah-tee-NEH) instead of Latino, Latin@, Latinx, Latin, or Hispanic.
• ***I capitalize “People of Color” in an effort to re-politicize and reclaim a term intended as political, to differentiate it from diluted and watered-down usages.

This article has also been published on Medium.