The University of California San Diego is drawing criticism over posters that have appeared on campus asserting that the term “minorities” is offensive and should be replaced by “people of color.”
A picture posted on Reddit shows one of the posters hanging at UCSD’s John Muir College. In three text bubbles arranged to evoke the image of a traffic signal, the poster instructs viewers to “stop saying minorities,” explaining that “This term diminishes the voices of people of color by assuming a predominantly white, middle-class majority,” and recommends that they “say instead people of color.”
The submission generated a firestorm of outrage, eliciting comments pointing out that “not all ‘minorities’ are so because of their ethnicity” (handicapped and LGBTQ individuals, for instance), and that not all ethnic minorities are easily distinguishable by their skin color (notably Hispanics).
One of the most prevalent sentiments, expressed primarily by individuals describing themselves as light-skinned Hispanics, is that the poster’s advice exacerbates the difficulties they face in being accepted as a minority.
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