I am offended by the terms “people of color” and “white.”
Last spring Western Washington University President Bruce Shepard ignited a controversy about campus diversity with his use of the word “white.” Conservatives picked on Dr. Shepard, saying “he’s being very insensitive to how people are perceived based on the color of their skin. It’s wrong when you do it no matter what the color of the skin is.”
I suspect the right wingers were being hypocrites, picking on a term that Dr. Shepard used as a short hand. The President, however contributed kindling to the fire by blogging “In the decades ahead, should we be as white as we are today, we will be relentlessly driven toward mediocrity.”
Dr. Shepard’s words could be restated to say that white kids lower the excellence of WWU. I suppose another way of saying the same thing would be to say that WWU is a hick school in a white state.
The President got into this trouble because he is equating “color” to discrimination. The term “people of color,” apparently the antonym of “white” is used to include Hispanics supposedly because Hispanics are dark skinned. But, not all dark skinned folk fit the official category of people of color and not all Hispanics are especially dark. Worse, Hispanics look pretty much like Italians. Why should a Rodriguez be treated differently from a Bertoldi ? Both Mexicans and Italian are “darkish.” Spanish is a language not a race. Look at Chile, a Hispanic country with a large population of German immigrants. Would a Shultz from Chile be a person of color? Would a Lopez from Chile be a person of color? For that matter is the current Pope, a native of Argentina, a Hispanic?
My wife has family who emigrated here from Cuba, are her (Jewish) relatives not people of color because they are not Christians? Am I a person of color now that Spain has recognized my right as Sephard to resume Spanish citizenship? Does the UW recruit from Seattle’s large community of Sephardic Jews in the name of cultural diversity? If I return to my family’s original surname of “Negri,” will that make me a person of color?
These color words do little to address historic disparities. No one can argue that indigenous Americans and descendants of African slaves do not still suffer as the result of abuse done in the name of racial superiority. Is that heritage different for a Native American who looks “white?”
Of course there is bigotry based on skin color, but equating ethnic diversity with skin color is hypocrisy. It is bizarre to suggest that Barack Obama’s daughters are adding more cultural diversity to the Friends’ School in DC than that school got when the Friends hosted Chelsea Clinton. Here in Seattle, Lakeside very actively recruits the sons and daughters of affluent Black families. It is offensive to claim that Lakeside or Friends address America’s debt for past wrongs by hosting rich kids with dark skins.
The issue of color gets worse when we look at the color of Indian American students in this year’s California State Science Fair:
Eesha Khare, a 12th grade student of Lynbrook High School in San Jose, California, won the top award for ‘Project of the Year’ in the senior grade at the fair held earlier this year, India-West reported Saturday.
Khare also won a $5,000 for her project, ‘Design and Synthesis of Hydrogenated TiO2-Polyaniline Nanorods for Flexible High-Performance Supercapacitors’.
Much the same story can be seen on any US campus. Chinese, Korean, Indian. Caribbean and African students … all presumably “people of color” are excelling. Surely a Barbadoan and a Hindu are as much people of color as someone with a Hispanic surname?
I believe that President Shepard used the W word to conflate the interests of Black, Native, and Hispanic people to increases their political power. Sadly, I think the conservative critics are correct that this is a bad idea. The KKK, the White Citizens Councils and the Aryan Nation exclude Catholics and Jews as not being “white.” The poison of racism is all too evident in the Tea Party. Ted Cruz, a far right Senator from Texas, advertises himself as a person of color because his ancestors come from Cuba. How does this heritage make Mr. Cruz any less of a right wing bigot? Is he less devoted to paying our debts to slaves than I am?
We can do much better.