I have always objected to the term “people of color” at the UW because it creates a dichotomy based on the false notion of “race.”
This problem is very well illustrated by the reports last Spring in the media about a discrimination suit by a “white” professor at a traditionally black state college in Alabama.
“A white professor is accusing Alabama State University, an Historically Black College, of discriminating against him and his partner after they blew the whistle on racial preferences at the school.”
As it turns out the story is not quite what it appears to be. The “white guy” is Choctaw. He is also gay.
That said, the concerns by the African American faculty of Alabama State University are based on the perceptions of some that faculty with white skins undermine the school’s black culture. Is there any way not to see this as racism? Do African Americans have as much a right to have “black” schools as “white” people have a right to dominate most of America’s publically funded universities?
This issue is very real at the UW. The term” people of color” seems to me to be a euphemism for escaping our real issues with African Americans, Native Americans and other groups who have been hurt by American bigotry. The idea that the UW has two camps divided by skin tone ignores America’s persistent issues repairing the harm done to the descendants of those who survived slavery and extermination of our indigenous peoples. In our own school, this hypocrisy may be epitomized by the existence of a “Faculty Council on Minority Affairs” that is charged not with addressing these wrongs but promoting something called diversity.
While we all support diversity, the needs of a Dravidian computer scientist or a Brazilian anthropologist simply are not based on skin color. The use of “people of color” undermines the issues facing a Squamish physician at the UW School of Medicine or a UW artist with a heritage like that of Jacob Lawrence.