I was reading an article about students from a historically black college trying to find jobs in Silicon Valley, and noticed this quote:
When she finally visited [Silicon Valley] during college, it struck her as a startlingly homogeneous culture, made up of white and Asian people…
“There are not a lot of people of color in the Valley”
Are Asians not “people of color”? Now that I think about it, I’ve hardly ever heard it used that way. What comes to mind when you hear that phrase?
I think Asians are generally considered POC but people equivocate on this a bit when it’s convenient? Like Asians are underrepresented in Oscar nominations/wins, so they’re people of color when we’re talking about that, but overrepresented in Silicon Valley, so in that context they’re just kind of glossed over. (But I don’t think you’ll hear people outright say “Asians aren’t people of color” even in the latter case.)
(There’s an Asian woman who writes for my school newspaper (and refers to herself as a “woman of color.”) But in her column the other day she referred to “racism and white supremacy” as “those systems that empower and advantage white and light-skinned folks at the expense of Black, brown and Indigenous peoples.” So yeah I thought that was interesting.)