"Racialised" is much better than PoC but I've been leaning a lot on the concept of racial markedness. Because that allows us to make statements like "the name Jamal is racially marked in USA". Rather than saying something like "Jamal is a PoC name", a nonsense statement, saying it's racially marked in USA allows us to contrast with societies like Albania or the Arab countries where the name Jamal is ordinary, thus unmarked.
It's a concept I've kind of imported from linguistic analysis; saying a speech pattern is more or less marked does not really allow us to avoid the subject of who's doing the marking. A statement like "womens' speech is more marked in Lakota" necessitates that we understand that it's the Lakota who are marking womens' speech. A foreigner can't tell the difference and probably doesn't understand why it would thus be weird to see a man using speech patterns associated with women, in the same way an Albanian wouldn't understand why USA people would think Jamal is a Black name.
This post is currently nine months old at a little over 43,500 notes but there is a hollowness to its success because the two most common replies to it are "wow, racialised! that's really good!" even though this post is critical of "racialised" language, so I guess people must have checked out after word six, and "I speak [romance language] and this is how we've been talking for a while."
On this latter point I must say that I know that because this post was written in a hospital waiting room in Brasil as that hospital was racially discriminating against me. Not this particular hospital, but multiple others in the Brasilian public healthcare system, would commit acts of overt violence and medical abuse towards me, causing injuries that still affect my life today, close to a year later.
It was written specifically in response to the several posters (like, print-outs on a wall) conveniently laying out the racial colour theory of the Brasilian census, which is very much distinct from, yet no less arbitrary and stupid than, that of the United States where people think "people of color" is in any way descriptive of anything.
Like the United States, Brasil recognises five races of man. Unlike the United States, those five races are white, black, partial, indigenous, and yellow. If you're noticing a few people missing, so was I, but they were so proud of themselves for being able to list all five that I couldn't say anything.
The other reason I couldn't say anything was that because 1. I was unable to predict years in advance that I would end up in Brasil as I would have needed to to learn Portuguese by then, and 2. I am autistic anyway, I had to speak through a screen translator and every one of the dozens of public health professionals who I interacted with in Brasil, virtually without exception, glared daggers at me like I was the lowest piece of shit scum they'd ever laid eyes on. I in fact memorised the name of the one clerical worker who did not, and began to refuse to talk to anyone except her, until she, too, simply stopped looking at me like I wasn't even there.
Even though they could name all five of the races of man, they wanted my ass out of the UBS and out of the country -- naming all five did not make them as not-racist as they thought it did and nor did it enable an actual institutional prevention of, or response to, the exploding tooth implant I was to eventually receive from an obviously racist dentist who I should not have let into my face with a drill to begin with. For complaining about this, I was banned from the UBS, which is literally not even legal at all. They can't do that but they did.
Having arrived in Brasil only a few months prior, and unable to tell my ass from a pothole in the road, my question was not "what race am I", because that is a stupid and nonsense question and asking it makes you an idiot, but "why are they doing this to me, despite their enlightened view of their own racial hierarchy which they clearly have all figured out".
I had the, uh, privilege? of living in multiple parts of Brasil over a few months last year, and over that period I accidentally became a huge fan of Brasilian ATR music, which in fact I was using to teach myself Portuguese so that the armed security guards that they keep at hospitals in case a refugee shows up would stop literally throwing me out of the waiting room by the chronic pain triggers because the wait times I was there for exceeded the battery life on my phone, which I needed to communicate. So I had to plug my phone in. They didn't like that. They had zero infrastructure for people who did not natively and fluently speak clear Brasilian Portuguese. They didn't want any. And they were clearly as pissed off that I was getting help from LLMs as your average Threads dipshit. Why couldn't I just die?
ATR music. I say I accidentally became a fan because I didn't really understand what the songs were until I'd been listening to them on loop for months and months. This is how I learned Portuguese.
Music played during medicine ceremonies in african traditional religions. ATR is another one of those terms which refers to so many things that are very different from each other that it only really makes sense to use if you're discussing something like, four times in your entire life. Brasilian ATRs, to give a very stupid and reductive and ultimately incorrect summary, are kind of like early drag shows, except instead of gender, they deconstruct the political mythology of civilisational contact zones. Brasilian ATRs essentially have stock characters by whom a practitioner is possessed in order to make commentary on what a yank might parse as "race relations". Necessarily, these characters are, to yank eyes, out-and-out racial caricatures, such as an indigenous hunter who lives without the shackles of civilisation, and deceased slaves, who within the mythology of the practice have deep spiritual wisdom to impart upon an audience by virtue of this. As one wanders further north, there is a wider variety of these archetypes including Portuguese monarchs, sailors, and so forth, whose presence implies a very different "racial makeup" which is closer to the one that one might find discussed in actual historical literature than the genocide denying five-colour system everyone has to pretend is real if they want to get a rabies shot after getting attacked by somebody's pet doggo. (Even the UBS took this situation seriously when it happened to me.)
This description, I am very sure, is shocking to yank eyes. But unlike some of "y'all", I sat my partial ass down and listened and I'm glad I did because it provided my only workable context for anything that goes on in Brasil. "Racially" open medicine ceremonies where people dress up as Indian hunters and deceased slaves in order to receive blessings from the Orixas before being openly assassinated by the latifundia are much less racist spaces overall than Brasilian hospitals that clutch pearls at the terms that their victims (and yours, yank readers, you fordlandian genociders,) use to describe their own histories and experiences. They are much less racist than anything you people do on here.
This post is about using descriptive scientific terminology over politically correct language designed to launder the status quo of genocidal imperialism.
It is an argument that people who are not genocidal imperialists (so, not you, yank reader of any race of man) should maintain authority over the way we discuss our own roles in the world rather than being policed by people who are genocidal imperialists and who want us to discuss that in a certain way rather than in the ways we have evolved to do so.
The people who live in the Amazonian rainforest doing redface ayahuasca have forgotten more about this than you will ever know and should be deferred to over their colonisers.
