Politically correct language

Can you tell what is the difference between these terms? One of them is not like the others:

• "Non-white people"
• "Colored people"
• "People of color"

To the average person they might sound like pretty much synonymous, just three different ways of saying the same thing. But they are not! Two of them are racist, while the remaining one is the "politically correct" term.

More specifically, the third one is ok, while the other ones are offensive. At least at this moment. Why? Who knows. The phase of the Moon, maybe?

Let's see how long before the third one becomes inappropriate as well. I'm really wondering if social justice warriors will then go back to their old YouTube videos where they use the term and remove them.

As with all political correctness, it's pretty much arbitrary and ever-shifting. Again and again I encounter that yet another word is, somehow, "racist", or at the very least "inappropriate". Like the word "oriental". It's somehow inappropriate. Because reasons. (How long before "Asian" becomes inappropriate? A couple of years, I bet.)