It has become common in Social Justice circles to talk about “decentring whiteness”, for example in this book or this article. I think decentring whiteness is a great idea – but too many interventions done in its name serve to do the exact opposite.

First consider the term “people of colour”. The most common argument made for using this term instead of “non-white” is that “non-white” defines that “non-white” “necessarily defines people by a negative”, as Rachelle Hampton proclaims in Slate – it defines people by what they are not. That’s true, of course. But so does “people of colour”! It just hides that negation behind a silly prettified euphemism. The category named by “people of colour” is exactly the same as that named by “non-white” – namely, of course, people who are not white. The only thing that makes “people of colour” “people of colour” is that negation, that fact of not being white. It defines people by a negative that it tries to hide. By hiding the way it centres, it makes it that much harder to actually decentre whiteness.

Just like “non-white”, the term “people of colour” makes everything about whiteness by presuming the most fundamental distinction is the one between white people and everybody else. But “people of colour” goes a step further toward centring whiteness, because it reifies non-whiteness: it pretends that non-whiteness is a thing, rather than the negation of a thing. By not admitting that it is a merely negative term, it makes the world’s seven billion non-white people appear to all have something in common more than that bare negative fact of not being among its one billion white people. In that assertion of commonness, it centres whiteness far more: it implies that the fact of being non-white is a something rather than a negation, even though a negation is all it actually is. It focuses our attention on non-whiteness more than it needs to be. It leads to situations like the colleague of mine who, ten years ago, asked me “Don’t you feel a special solidarity with black people?” and couldn’t accept it when I responded “No more than a white person would”: this white person just could not handle the idea that there were more important distinctions than the one between white-like-her and not-white-like-her.