Thank you, that's an interesting reply. Again perhaps this is my own lack of informed perspective, but I had always imagined that grouping all "non-white" people together under a single term was part of the problem. It seems like an act that diminishes the distinct cultures all being lumped in together, as well as the obvious racism if the whole group was then treated as somehow inferior or less worthy. But from what you wrote, it seems like at least some people in the affected communities do find these kinds of umbrella terms useful, as a form of solidarity and recognition of shared problems? But then even within those communities not everyone agrees on which terms are useful for positive reasons and which have too much negative baggage or pejorative history, and that's how we get the apparent contradictions like "colored people" being socially unacceptable, but not in the context of the NAACP, and at the same time "people of color" being socially acceptable?

yeah mostly accurate, but a lot of people would not agree with me for saying so :)

but lets look at your example source of cognitive dissonance, NAACP:

The NAACP has done historically monumental things on behalf of a group of very different people that were being excluded as if they were the same. It comes from a different era and different motivated individuals taking initiative. It predates a different individual pushing “African American” much later on. That predates such rampant subsequent immigration and population growth in the US where enough people find African American to be so ambiguous to the point of ridiculous, while there are many slave descendants that take pride in the term and make it their whole identity (or have it forced on them like many black people in other English speaking countries with no American parents, this is particularly comical to me), whereas others who may also be slave descendants adopt black American or other adjectives and identifiers. With the NAACP there is no utility in changing that acronym and no need to or drive to, like a landmark. It wouldn’t surprise me if they arbitrarily did change the name on their own, but there is no talk or consensus amongst its beneficiaries to do so (unlike other landmarks).

Thanks again. I learned something today. :-)

> the obvious racism if the whole group was then treated as somehow inferior or less worthy

Well, yes, this is how the group forms in the first place. It's made up of people who don't have an identity in common other than the one that's forced upon them of "non-white" by the white people discriminating against them.

Note that in countries which aren't white-majority you don't generally get a group of people holistically identifying as "people of colour", even if the same ethnicities would do so in the US. Instead you get different forms of racial discrimination.

Similarly LGBT+ merges a group of people with very different identities and practices, the primary thing they have in common is receiving the same kind of abuse from the same people.