I was waiting for the subway with a colleague after a meeting where we were discussing how to attract more diverse faculty members into the trauma studies program curriculum that I chair.
My colleague is a progressive social worker who has been promoting antiracist conversations for many years. As we were talking she used the term “people of color” to refer to me, consciously or unconsciously seeing me as “other.” Because of her characteristics, I felt free to make the comment that I didn’t like the term because instead of inclusive, it sounded really divisive to me — as in “all the others.” She looked at me in disbelief and said “I don’t care, I like it.
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