LIke others, Allison, I never used the term POC until I saw other Black writers using it. That felt as though it legitimized the phrase, so I started using it. I find that the road to writing about issues around race is so potholed and bumpy with missteps, most particularly as a White person who really does care about such things, and there seem at times to be setups to make glaring mistakes. Sensitivities run high, and no matter how careful I try to be, how attentive to the zeitgeist, I will inevitably step in someone's feelings. I would posit that sensitivity around the issues of word use vary significantly from person to person, which shouldn't come as a surprise, but in saying that, this means that in one article if a term is avoided that writer can be slammed for not using a term, and in another if they do use it, they can be slammed for using it.

I absolutely, positively see your point, however. The challenge I see, largely because I really do read anti racism writers and MarleyK's material has been a part of my diet for some time now, the point about how the Black community inhabits the absolute bottom rung of racial respect. All too often even with the Black community I understand that colorism forms an additional, vicious strata of human value based on a miniscule layer of epidermis, an inter-race level of racism thanks to White Supremacy.

I find all of it horrific. However I would only point out that those of us who commit to being allies and who do write on the topic may well not always understand or can anticipate how to navigate the subtleties, and there are many if only due to the extraordinary diversity present within the Black diaspora. We are going to make mistakes and missteps. I fear that when met with angry backlash about the use of a term when the writer genuinely is trying to do the right thing, the movement may lose a critically important and necessary ally. I have had that happen myself, when something I wrote was misinterpreted and taken completely out of context.

As a result I have stopped commenting and writing as much as I used to. That is the loss of a voice that absolutely supports what you and others are doing. There's a danger to that, for we absolutely need White voices speaking up and calling shit out. While I don't have an answer, and I absolutely understand the anger based on centuries of abuse, I am simply pointing out the challenges we all face just having a conversation. I worry at times that when we spend too much time discussing terms, we may lose soldiers in the war, which rages on, and desperately needs more allies than we currently have. There is so much variation among Black people, this extraordinarily varied, rich, diverse and magnificently varied worldwide community, and each individual, as with us all, is going to have different feelings about word use. We can't afford as a species to worry so much about terminology that we get distracted from the real work around racism.

That does,'t mean that words don't matter. All I am saying as that there is a lot of variation in terms of how people prefer words, and that can waste precious time in a world already on fire.

But that is just me, I am a White writer, I care, and I am trying my damnedest to do the right thing. I'm also not using POC any more, but kindly keep in mind we are all on a learning arc and doing the best we can.