I get that there is a need to differentiate, for the purpose of discussion, traditionally privileged white people from, well, literally everyone else. Any label using a negative prefix like "non-white" or "un-privileged" is not desirable because it suggests a lack of something. But it seems to me like we should be able to do a lot better than a rephrasing of a term associated with the Jim Crow era.

> I get that there is a need to differentiate, for the purpose of discussion, traditionally privileged white people from, well, literally everyone else.

Is there? Asians are wealthier, more educated, more upwardly mobile, less likely to be shot by the police, and live longer, than whites. As an Asian-American man, I can expect to live as long as my Irish-American wife. Latinos, meanwhile, have various disparities resulting from the character and recency of immigration, but have similar economic mobility to whites, and within 1-3 generations achieve economic parity with whites. Cubans, who came to the US as refugees with no money, achieved parity in just one generation. 60% of multiracial people, mostly white-asian and white-hispanic, identify as white, and not multiracial.

Black and Native American people, meanwhile, face persistent economic disparities that are both large and are completely unchanged since the segregation era. Almost all black-white multiracial people identify as Black or multiracial, not as white.

The constructed term "people of color" actually obscures the fundamental dynamics of American society:

1) America is incredibly successful at assimilating immigrants, white or non-white, both socially and economically. The term "people of color" obscures the fact that these groups are basically experiencing the same economic and social trajectory that Germans, Irish, Polish, Italians, etc., experienced over American history.

2) America has been unable to make any progress at eliminating economic disparities for two groups that face unique historical circumstances: Black people, and Native Americans. The term "people of color" obscures the fact that these groups are facing American experiences that are sui generis in American history.

"People of color" is strictly less useful of a term than what preceded it, "underrepresented minority." And it appears that people realize that impracticality, because you've seen the emergence of phrases like "assimilation into whiteness" or "white-adjacent" to describe Asians and economically assimilated Latinos. These are phrases (which are offensive, by the way) coined to remedy a self-inflicted problem: defining who is "privileged" in the country in terms of "whiteness" and not something that actually reflects society.