of color

Meanings

1. Nonwhite; of a race other than white, for example black.
2. Belonging to a category of people with mixed black and white ancestry in the Americas in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Etymology

Attested since the late 18th century, initially in reference to a category of mixed-race (partially black, partially white) people in the Americas; compare French de couleur (attested since at least 1779 in gens de couleur), Spanish de color. The phrase continued in occasional use throughout the 1800s and 1900s and was used by e.g. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963, around which time its modern meaning began to take shape. Its use by black activists picked up from the 1970s (e.g. black women who used "women of color" at the National Women's Conference in 1977) onward, reaching wide circulation by the 1990s.