I am not white in the sense that "whiteness" is a socially constructed racial classification, but I am "white" in the sense that the color of my skin is white. I'm still not really "white-passing"; you wouldn't look at me and think I'm a white American or a westerner in general.
People will sometimes call me a "person of color". This tends to make me feel uncomfortable because I'm not really marginalized by society in the same way black or brown people are, and to me PoC is a term used mainly to draw attention to that form of marginalization.
It's not that I'm not marginalized at all because of the way I look. When I was younger, I was told to shave my beard any time I flew so I wasn't harassed in the airport for looking too terrorist-y.
Maybe my discomfort with the term PoC being used for me is that it specifically calls out the color aspect, and the color of my skin is white.
So I usually tell people I call myself "non-white" instead. What do you think? Maybe I'm overthinking this. I'd especially like to hear thoughts from black and brown comrades about this: would you call me a person of color? Thanks.
Edit: I'll probably stick to calling myself non-white, but I won't correct anybody if they call me a PoC. Thanks for the thoughts everyone, I appreciate it.
The Nazis actually explicitly toned down the American codified definitions of race because they were too stringent. The "one drop rule" meant that anyone in America with any provable black ancestry, literally a single black ancestor, was legally black and therefore subject to Jim Crow laws. The Nazis realized that if they applied the same standards to Germany there wouldn't be much of anyone left, including a good portion of the leadership.
Holy shit.
Yeah ikr. And then those laws pretty much stuck around in America for 20 years after Hitler shot himself. And were only lifted after years of massive sustained protest. Shit really is wild when you lay it all out
Similar thing with Native Americans too.
Yup! Manifest destiny is just America's Lebensraum, again explicitly cited by Nazi leaders. Apparently wild west stuff was super popular in Germany around the turn of the century, and I always wonder how much influence that had, just as like background culture, to this