People of Color

People of color is a phrase that is commonly used in America to refer to nonwhites in the population. It is an all-encompassing expression that expands upon and may eventually replace the term minorities when referring to racial minorities in aggregate. As a generalized concept, “people of color” frames the sociological, political, and enumerative racial dynamics of nonwhites. “People of color” is a shorthand way of referring to Latinos, African Americans, Asians, American Indians, and myriad other racial/ethnic categories in the United States, all as a group.

For centuries, race has been a key issue around which American institutions and social relations have been constructed and sustained. The term people of color reflects one way of framing how groups are organized around race and how, in the very broad sense, there have been unequal distributions of power, privilege, and status between whites and other groups in the population. This relatively new expression stems from an attempt to articulate progressive ideas about race and power in which whites (as a race) have historically held power and privilege, and nonwhites have been excluded.

Collectively, people of color in the United States constitute 27.6 percent of the population. The U.S. census distinguishes six categories of race/ethnicity, as defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget's classification system: white; Latino or Hispanic; black or African American; American Indian or Alaskan Native; Asian; and Native Hawai'ian or other Pacific Islander. The latter five, singularly and collectively, are generally considered people of color.

The largest group of people of color in the population during 2010 was Hispanic/Latino. African Americans (or black, Negro) is a second subset of people of color who were 12.6 percent of the population in 2010. The Asian race was the third-largest, at 4.8 percent of the 2010 population. American Indians/Alaska Natives comprised less than 1 percent of those who lived in America at this time, and Native Hawai'ians and other Pacific Islanders were the smallest group, constituting just 0.1 percent of those living in the United States in 2010. The 2000 census was the first in American history to allow people to self-identify with multiple racial categories. Approximately 9 million people, or 2.4 percent of the population, claimed two or more races in 2010. Bi-racial and multiethnic people are often considered people of color because it is likely that one or both of their parents are nonwhite.