communities of color

[Indigo Som]

Regarding this pair of questions:
How common is it to regard "X of color" as excluding Asians?
"How common is it for Asians, particularly the Chinese, to regard 'X
of color' as including Asians?"

These are my experiences (speaking as middle-aged Berkeley lefty Chinese American):

Different interpretations of "of color" correlate most of all to political identity & secondarily to class, especially level of education.

"of color" as applied to all people who are not of European descent remains a PC term used & understood by us PC folk: liberals, progressives, radicals of all ages & ethnicities. We tend to be more educated & more fluent in English. For us, "people of color" is a term of coalition, signaling our common cause with each other in the fight against racism.

"of color" meaning only African American is used/understood by a group of people who seem to be 1) born earlier than approx. mid 1950s, 2) usually African American, but occasionally white. (It may well be that I simply don't encounter those older white people who use/understand the term that way.) Also, perhaps 3) not particularly political & 4) not highly educated?

Among Asian Americans, immigrants who struggle with English as a second language would usually not recognize "of color" as applying to themselves, unless their smartass child comes back from college & tells them so ;) Or they learn it from their union organizer.

Not all of us smartass Asian American kids come back from college w/ this information. Campus Christian types might understand "of color" to include Asians when someone else says it, but in my day (20+ years ago) they were highly unlikely to say it themselves. I suspect this has not changed much to the present day.

Likewise among Latinos, the Mexican immigrant cleaning the roof gutters is less likely to say, understand or identify as "of color" than the Xicana lawyer who is fighting on his behalf. But her mainstream "Hispanic" law-school classmate now working in corporate law is highly unlikely to call herself a woman of color.

In my 20s in the early 1990s I remember advertising for a "woman of color" housemate, only to be puzzled by the stream of working-class, middle-aged Black women who responded.


Someone also asked if Jews are "of color". In my angry young woman days I used to get in *huge* fights with Jews of European descent who styled themselves people of color. Their argument: oppression based on ethnic identity=person of color. My argument: there are different kinds of oppression; anti-semetism is one kind; & racism is another kind, the specific form that creates the need for the term "people of color" in the first place. (Why the volatility? To say you are a person of color when you are white is to deny -- & thus duck responsibility for -- your white-skin privilege. A big no-no!) There are of course Jews of color, lots of them. They weren't the ones I was arguing with.

Okay... there's my handful of data points for you language geeks :) Back to lurking.

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