About three years ago, I stopped referring to people of African, Latino, Asian, and Native American descent as minorities.
I dropped the word “minority” from my spoken vocabulary for some of the same reasons many African-Americans buried Negro in the 1960s and instead started calling themselves Black or Afro-American. (Ironically, more than 50,000 people wrote into the 2000 U.S. Census that they were Negroes.)
I think the number one reason why people use the term minorities is that it is easier and more concise for academics and reporters to say and write minorities than African-Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. It is one word as opposed to eight, and most people know whom they mean when they say it.
I have tended instead to use people of color. But even that is problematic because it presupposes that White is not a color. Or rather, more crudely, it infers the normalization or invisibility of Whiteness.
There are a growing number of academics using the term “underrepresented” without a qualifier in the place of “minorities.” I am one of them, but, as I sit here and think about that title, I find problems with it as well. Last I checked, Blacks are just as essentially “overrepresented” in crucial negative areas (prison, unhealthy, poverty rates) as they are “underrepresented” in those same positive areas (freedom, healthy, and wealth rates). It becomes a matter of looking at the cup half full, or half empty.
Furthermore, I think “underrepresented” can be problematic for the same reason I stopped using “minority.” I think, since we live in a society that has been born and bred on the racist ideas of particular racial groups being inferior to Whites, we should not utter names signifying this supposed inferiority. “Under” connotes inferiority. “Minor” connotes inferiority. If we do want to use this minority, then how about “minoritized” (to steal a term from Temple University doctoral student Weckea Lilly)?
Some may say it does not matter. As long as the user of the term does not consider the person to truly be “under” or “minor,” then what is the big deal? Well, I hope those who think it does not matter accept the justification African-Americans provide who call each other “Nigga.” They say too it does not matter. “Nigga” does not really mean “Nigger,” they say, just as sure as some would say “under” and “minor” do not actually connote inferior.
