On "People of Color"

In his 1963 “I have a Dream” speech, Dr King spoke of a nation where our “children will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”. Two generations later, his dream seems as elusive to us as it was inspiring then.

For me, nothing epitomizes our racial divide more than the commonly used expression “people of color”. The term is a convenient way of designating ethnic groups that are not of European decent, in other words, the non-Whites. As a lexical corollary, if Whites are not “people of color”, are they “colorless people” then? That would be rather sad.

A more unfortunate and sinister implication of simplifying our racial complexity is that it boxes our view of our world into a bipolar model, with people from European descent at one end, and at the other end, a common waste basket for the rest of humanity, just on the basis of skin color. This allows us to ignore the genetic mix, the diversity of world cultures and values, and the social meritocracy that all ethnic groups contain, even within people of European descent. 

Words matter. Racial issues are more than skin deep. Thinking of our society as just Whites vs. “people of color” frames our mind-set into a distorted vision of America as a bipolar nation of “Us vs. Them”, and takes us farther away from Dr King’s vision of a nation where all are judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.

(Published in the Gazette Times, Corvallis, July 29, 2019)