The “minority” label inhibits rather than advances equal justice or reform. “Minority” is pejorative jargon. People of color with criminal records: please stop using that term. All people with criminal records are already stuck like gum on the bottom of the majority’s shoe; we don’t need to make pulling the gum from the shoe even more difficult for people with color by willingly using imprecise language like “minorities.”
Language has many uses, among them it can inspire or condemn. Using a pejorative term to describe oneself does not promote equal justice. “Minority” was inspired by the “majority” establishment long ago when “minorities” were viewed essentially as an inconvenient problem.
Roderick J. Harrison is a demographer with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which is an African-American (not a “minority”) think tank.[1] Harrison notes that “minority” refers to more than just numbers. “The word’s origins are that these are populations that once had the status of minors before the law,” … These are populations that, in one way or another, did not have full legal status or full civil rights.” When considering doing away with the term, “the question is, how far along the road to full equality have they come?” [2]
When people with criminal records speak, our language and lexicon should not suggest any lack of equality; it’s tough enough having criminal records. We should speak with a unified voice, or we shouldn’t speak at all. Why compound the problem? Or, if the extra challenges that people of color with criminal records face is a perceived wrong we want to “fight to right,” let’s not begin with a “color persona” that suggests an inadvertent acceptance of less than full equality.
Driving social change for equal justice requires that we must reframe the manner in which “majorities” look at the social problems people with criminal records face, regardless of what color we are. The collateral consequences of conviction know no race or class boundaries. We must be mindful that talking about social justice without transformative action and justice is just that – talk. So, it doesn’t help advance the ball down the field to self-identify as a beleagured subset of people with criminal records.
People with criminal records should be ultra-careful about being misperceived as advancing a pity party just because “XX% of the people with criminal records are minorities” – as if that alone were a reason to support our cause? A “minority” compared to whom?
A preferable mainstream term is “people of color,” because the term encompasses all non-white people. And, it’s preferable because it provides the opportunity to broadcast this message any time people with criminal records write, speak or congregate. The term “people of color” has a more positive connotation than “minorities.” “People of color” are culturally significant. “Minority” conjures images of marginalized people who have less value than the majority.
One cynic has queried speciously as to how “colored people” is a vulgar, racist term, but “people of color” is politically-correct? Aren’t “colored people” and “people of color” the exact same thing?[3] No, they are not the same. “Colored people” derives from a pre-Civil Rights Act time when it was pejorative, and importantly, when “colored people” were nowhere near in numbers anywhere near the road to becoming “majority” like today.
People of color with criminal records should never want to telegraph to majorities that they don’t matter as much as the majority. An admirable example of mainstreaming the cessation of “minority” from the lexicon occurred in 2001, when San Diego’s city council struck “minority” from official usage and stopped using the term “Southeast San Diego” to denote largely black and Hispanic neighborhoods. This helped “move away from the pejorative connotations … and move to something that was respectful,” said Danell Scarborough, a human resources manager with the city.[4]
It’s already old news that in America the minority has fast been becoming the majority. [5] And “people of color” as a concept and term has become mainstream among those who do not have criminal records.[6] So, those of us with criminal records need to join the people of color crowd and put “minority” in the lexicon garbage can along with ‘’negro,” “nigger,” and all the other words no one these day would ever say.
[1] From it’s web site: “The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies is one of the nation’s premier research and public policy institutions and the only one whose work focuses exclusively on issues of particular concern to African Americans and other people of color. For over three decades, our research and information programs have informed and influenced public opinion and national policy to benefit not only African Americans, but every American. http://www.jointcenter.org/index.php/about_the_joint_center
[2] The Term ‘Minority’ Criticized As Outdated, Inaccurate As Nation’s Demographics Change. http://www.blacknews.com/pr/minority201.html
[3] Christopher Skeet, “People of Color,” The Chicago Flame (Feb. 11, 2008) http://media.www.chicagoflame.com/media/storage/paper519/news/2008/02/11/Opinions/People.Of.Color-3199140.shtml
[4] The Term “Minority” Criticized, Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] See, e.g., Human Rights Campaign: Working for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Equal Rights, http://www.hrc.org/issues/people_of_color/people_of_color_introduction.asp; People of Color Network: Building Healthy Communities by Supporting Children and Strengthening Families, http://www.pocn.com/
Posted on July 12, 2010
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