> I don't fully understand why this happens, but it's pretty common to see people say "nonwhite" when they clearly mean "black".
Americans’ conception of race really only has white and black. They don’t know much about other races, so they project their mental conceptions about black people onto other races.
This is obvious when you see “people of color” applied in ways that really only make sense if you’re talking about black people. But also consider affirmative action. Hispanics as a group have similar economic status to blacks as a group, because many are recent migrants from poor countries. But while blacks have much lower economic mobility than whites in the same income level, Hispanics have similar economic mobility to similarly situated whites. So the logic for preferring a black person over a white person with similar economic level doesn’t apply to Hispanics. But people never think about that, because they conceptualize Hispanics as a “kind of black person.”
Americans’ conception of race really only has white and black. They don’t know much about other races, so they project their mental conceptions about black people onto other races.
This is obvious when you see “people of color” applied in ways that really only make sense if you’re talking about black people. But also consider affirmative action. Hispanics as a group have similar economic status to blacks as a group, because many are recent migrants from poor countries. But while blacks have much lower economic mobility than whites in the same income level, Hispanics have similar economic mobility to similarly situated whites. So the logic for preferring a black person over a white person with similar economic level doesn’t apply to Hispanics. But people never think about that, because they conceptualize Hispanics as a “kind of black person.”