WHITE AS A BENCHMARK

I got this info from Wikipedia - I was just sitting at the computer getting a couple of CEU's knocked off...another story...I'm reading about Social Work for the aging, and the tag "minority and cultural awareness" popped up. This brought me to the phrase used by a person I know who is involved with politics. She wears her diversity status like ...a tight sweater! She calls herself a woman of color and refers to people of color during most of the conversations or, actually, monologues in which she engages.

A friend of mine and I think that whenever this woman says "people of color" that phrase translates to "HISPANIC".

Soooo, in my typical avoidance of studying, I went to Wikipedia and looked up "people of color" to see if it included other ethnic groups aside from Hispanic...(I knew it would, I just wanted to have written validation while I avoided learning about the aging population.)

"Person of color" or "people of color" are synonyms for people who are not white in the United States and for members of a non-white group. Some find this term equally offensive as the term "colored", primarily because it fixes whites as the benchmark for racial division, fostering an allegedly "us-versus-them" view of race relations.

Proponents of the term maintain that it must be realistically acknowledged that race domination is primarily caucasian, and that the term "person of color" is a better generic term for the racial underclass than "black person" as it includes ethnicities other than those strictly of African descent. This may include some Chicano/Latino, who can be white or of color, Asian American and many indigenous groups that also experience racism.

Hey, I get to be a "person of color" to the Islamistremists!