I am not a woman of color. At least, I refuse to call myself one. When people ask me to identify my cultural heritage, I usually reply that I am of Mexican and Chinese descent. I might even say I am Asian and Latino. In other words, it is not that I refuse be a "woman of color" because I am ashamed of my heritage, certainly not. I refuse to accept "women of color" and "people of color" as legitimate terms of description.

With each new round of enlightenment, intellectuals, politicians, and individuals with good intentions develop and evolve words and phrases to describe people like me. For example, there was the evolution from "colored" to "negro" to "African American." In recent years, using "ethnic minority" to refer to people who are not white began to be replaced by "people of color." I hear "people of color" and "women of color" used by professional people and throughout academia. Most recently, in my Women in the Third World class, a variety of progressive feminist authors used "women of color" to describe women who were not white. This term is awful, and I was saddened that it has become the new, politically correct - respectfully correct - label.

Upon hearing the phrase "people of color" for the first time, I immediately cringed. How is it different from the label "colored people" given in the pre-Civil Rights era to African Americans? If I said "the people of Germany," it would be completely interchangeable with "German people." Changing the words around in to a phrase that means the exact same thing does not help.

More importantly, describing people as "people of color" implies that there are people of no color. Rather, that there is a standard "people" and anyone that falls outside that standard must have a descriptive modifier. "People" are limited to individuals of European descent; everyone else is a "person of color." European ancestry is the standard, and the rest of us simply deviate from that standard. Such a notion is both absurd and very disturbing.

Initially, the terms were adopted by so-called "people of color" as a way to feel unified against white hegemony. The problem is that it sets up a binary that locks us as a society into a system of white vs. non-white, us vs. them, which does not solve anything.

In collecting my thoughts about this subject, I ran my argument by several people. One common question I got in response was, "What would you say instead of ‘people of color’?" The answer is: I don’t know. Part of me thinks that there shouldn’t ever be a time when people are either "white" or "not white," that cultural heritage should always be referenced specifically. Moreover, I don’t think that people have to have the perfect alternative solution in order to reject a bad idea.

Perhaps if we refuse to use the terms "people of color" and "women of color," more acceptable alternatives will surface. We’ll find a way to be descriptive when we need to without entrenching the language of false dichotomies. When talking to a friend of mine specifically about "women of color," he suggested saying "women in the constructed margins," insisting that the category was entirely a social construct and should be somewhat ridiculed as such. While the new description sounds ridiculously academic, I have found that using it makes me realize just how inaccurate and offensive "women of color" is. Using such a wordy new phrase shows just how ludicrous the category "of color" is; it is neither more descriptive nor more respectful.

For as much progress as we have supposedly made, I cannot believe that the best term that we can think to use is "people of color." If people insist on making such distinctions, they should be in language that is more accurate, instead of words that serve to reify racial hierarchies by making "white" the standard.