It’s another day ending in ‘y’ so that means the founder of the 1619 project has said something ridiculous again. Nikole Hannah Jones took to Twitter to argue about school demographics and decided she is now not just allowed to make up American history, but that she is the arbiter of race itself as well. In that argument she proclaimed that Asian people aren’t “people of color” because she didn’t like that someone had pointed out a school was majority Asian.

This is certainly an interesting standard.

Also, we need to call out how disingenuous it is to talk about specialized being majority POC when she means Asian.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) July 18, 2020

You get that? If you are of a minority that doesn’t fit her narrative, you are no longer worthy of the “people of color” moniker. That’s very, very convenient. It’s almost as if she views race as a construct that she can arbitrarily use to fit her ideology at any given moment. If a school is majority Asian and doing really well, then those people aren’t “real” minorities anymore. That allows the grift to continue indefinitely. The New York Times should probably reflect on what exactly they are enabling here by making her the de facto editor of their newspaper. They won’t though, as they are all in on this nonsense.

But perhaps Hannah Jones has inadvertently hit on a real truth by deciding that Asians aren’t “people of color.” The phrase itself is simply an attempt to form a power bloc. It minimizes the differences in struggles of various cultures and races, lumping everyone from a black person to someone from Argentina into the same victim class. It never made any sense, as is aptly explained by my colleague Kira Davis in one of her best op-eds to date (see The Term “People of Color” Hijacks Black America’s Hard Earned Legacy and I’m Sick of It). In a round about way, Hannah Jones is agreeing with that sentiment. She just doesn’t want to admit it because she still sees the non-East Asian, non-black “people of color” as a means to an end for her.

Everyone should see the game being played here and stop buying into it. Unfortunately, far too many Americans are so cowed by the mere threat of being called a racist that they’ll continue to go along with this idiocy. Every person is an individual, with individual struggles and their own history. We should treat each other with that eye instead of making ridiculous generalizations about each other and furthering divisions. Hannah-Jones is in the division business though, and it pays her well, so don’t expect any change in her behavior anytime soon.