Pigment

Image source: here.

I found it fascinating that I had such a huge reaction to the acronym 'QPOC'. It stands for 'Queer People of Colour', and it's roughly pronounced 'Kew Pok'. I spoke to one of my classmates from Connecticut yesterday about how I find the term incredibly stilted, and he mentioned how he struggled with it as well (he's white). Apparently in the U.S., the term 'Coloured People' was considered racist, and so they changed it to 'People of Colour'. I'm not sure how accurate that statement is, but for a person what wasn't grafted into the American way of life, or was born there, 'POC' doesn't bring with it the spirit of empowerment that it probably delivers to some others. And that's even with my solid dose of American tv growing up.

I think the clearest time I saw myself as 'yellow' was when I was 19, in the unisex bathroom of University College, brushing my teeth in the morning next to Ian. We were both topless and there was a distinctly yellow tone to my skin. And I remember thinking... wow. I *AM* yellow. And then my next thought was: waitaminute, when I was young, my sister was born with neonatal jaundice, and my dad told me she was so yellow because she had urine circulating through her body (I think he meant 'bilirubin' but that was probably too difficult a concept to explain to a child). So for a brief moment, the thought did cross my mind as I was brushing my teeth: do Asians carry a higher content of pee than our caucasian counterparts, and does it circulate around our system... can we pee longer, and pee further? It was a tragic train of thought (in hindsight), but eventually, I figured I really needed to know: Why does our skin carry golden tones? (see what I just did) I'm still not sure, but apparently, it's either the amount / percentage of fat we carry (fat, I'm told, is yellow) - we keep more around our eyes and body because we evolved to live survive in the cold; or we have more ceratone in our skin (the same thing that makes eggs yellow and carrots orange), and that higher ceratone content sits in our fat layer under our skin. I'm sure somewhere out there in internet-land, some very knowledgeable dermatologist is screaming and pulling out tufts of her hair. I apologise. But I'm now note really interested in knowing the real reason.

The reason I struggle with the term is this: why define yourself in reference to the colour of your skin? It's so strange. That's how other people define you.


If you grew up in Asia where everyone is predominantly 'coloured', it's not quite something you think of. Where I grew up, the spectrum of colours were wonderful and varied: kids of expatriates (Scandinavian, American, German etc); incredibly close Malay friends; loved my weekly dose of prata from the Indian man at Clementi; and even among the Chinese, our skin tones just go all the way from really fair to pretty dark. But if I'm mobilising or trying to talk about the issues of my community - and in this, I am talking about ethnicity and race and perhaps the larger Big Asia concept, why do it on the basis of our skin colour? It's so... prescriptive and obvious. Like calling men 'People with Penises'. Yes, it's accurate, but unless it's loaded with historical significance for you, it becomes very artificial. Actually, why not 'People with colour'? It makes it sound much more like an attribute rather than the identity itself. Oh... but I suppose QPWC would be a bit hideous to pronounce.

The interesting thing about our discussions last Saturday was that Shinen mentioned he was told he wasn't a person of colour when he was first in the U.S. And that changed somewhat later. And while people who have more than a certain level of ceratone in their skin are all subject to varying forms of discrimination, I suspect the Asian perspective is distinct from the other two groups within the label of POCs. Still, I hope that Asian voters were part of the incredible change that happened in the US recently. One striking observation made from the results of the recent election is this idea of Black and Hispanic voters now reaching a critical mass to be heard and that the Republican party needed to throw off its 'Grand Old Party' tag to become more inclusive and less extreme. And maybe in this case, the term People of Colour is something to be embraced. But in Australia, I'm not sure if our political warfronts are drawn in the same way. I would feel somewhat uncomfortable aligning myself with People of Colour against People of Non-Colour on election issues. As a side note, my secondary school teacher would balk at the use of 'Colour' to describe Black (which he called a shade) - but that's just art I guess.

I've bonded with people over Cartoons we watched as kids, our complete confusion and blinding fear-terror-fear of Heidegger, a love for the collection of the Ian Potter Museum, and a common apathy towards exercise. But I've never gone, OMG, you've obviously got a certain percentage of ceratone in your skin, we have SO much in common, we have all this dialogue we need to get into. That's not to say people who look a certain way aren't made to feel a certain way about themselves. And to pretend that skin colour doesn't matter is, perhaps, a little naive. But skin colour doesn't define a culture, and I probably have more in common with someone of a different skin tone (brown, blue, white, fuchsia) who grew up reading similar books to me, watching the same movies, had parents in similar occupations, travelled to certain places than I would because we share the same skin tone. And I think this difference becomes very obvious when you get enough critical mass in, say, an Asian community. Very quickly, it fractures into groups based on language spoken at home, food preferences, dress sense, earning capacity etc. So my hope is that while this group continues to be in contact with, and a part of the QPOC movement, I don't want to be defined by it. I'd like this to be a colouring book because it represents this idea that, yes, we're going to be talking about colour, people of colour, but that it's open, and blank enough to embrace anyone regardless of how they're defining themselves... and that the issues and the dialogue and the comments are sufficient enough to paint urgency, completeness and a vivid picture of what it means to be us: this complex beast of people with differing needs and identities, living and wanting to share the same page.