Eulogistic Of The Dyslogistic Analysis

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“The Most Eulogistic of the Dyslogistic”: Burke and the Usage of “Person of Colour”
The term “person of colour” is currently the preferred and most politically correct way to refer to non-white people in the United States. (I use “non-white” as a placeholder here; its implications are discussed further in the following paragraph.) Even so, it is not without its problems. When using the question-begging appellative of “person of colour”, one is inadvertently participating in a system that continues to label non-white people in a manner that directly connects to more antiquated terms that Bentham refers to as “dyslogistic” (Burke, 92), or negative, and emphasises binary categorisation between those who are white and those who are“other”, effectively harming the people that the term is in some way trying to define. …show more content…

Rather, it relates to other similar, more dyslogistic terms. The term “coloured”, now usually considered to be politically incorrect, is not so semantically different from “people of colour” and may subsequently evoke similar “assumption[s] on the part of the [audience]” (Burke, 94), especially in part to direct reference of “colour”. “Non-white” is less dyslogistic, but creates identificatory “division” (Burke, 22) by setting up an “us” versus “them” mentality in how it labels people in terms of what they are lacking, i.e., whiteness. “Minority” is a more general term that can also apply to other distinctions such as religion or to distinguish between races where the dominant group is not white, but it may also serve as a “vague generalit[y]” (Burke, 100), wherein the inclusivity of the word allows less charged notions of the term to be established in the “mind of [the] hearer” (Burke,