"People of Color" I recently received an email from a colleague that made reference to the term "people of color". I seem to see it everywhere nowadays. Oh, how I loathe this term...it builds in so many idiotic assumptions that it's hard to know where to begin. A sample: 1) It's inherently oppositional. The essential characteristic of those of non-European descent is that they are of non-European descent. Of course, this is the ONLY material distinction, as whites are the ONLY oppressors of note in all of world history. You'd never see those friendly non-whites like the Japanese or the Zulus or the Aztecs or the Arabs invading and/or oppressing their neighbors...no sir. 2) It elides all-important distinctions between non-white groups. This is particularly true on elite college campuses. I find myself restraining a chuckle whenever I see an East or South Asian-American on a podium denouncing the oppression of people of color. East Asians don't have slavery to harken back to, so they bring up the railroads (Chinese) and internment camps (Japanese). South Asians really have nothing to point to, except to remark upon being classified as "black" before 1965. (Never mind that the "people of color" term does just that.) Of course, Europeans also suffered indentured servitude and internment camps, and these "oppressed" East and South Asians have parents who are doctors/engineers/professors/etc., but they're non-white , you see! They are thus eligible to drink deep draughts from the goblet of bitterness, filled with the ferment of past wrongs (real and imagined) perpetrated against non-whites by those white devils. I mean, come on...The real gap in modern America is between high-IQ whites, Jews and East & South Asians on one hand, and low-IQ blacks and Hispanics on the other. See here for more details. It is the height of insistent blindness to claim that East & South Asians have more in common with blacks and Hispanics than they do with whites. 3) It leads to idiocy like this. Gah - enough said. 4) It means that one "person of color" can stand in for another when it comes time to hide job performance. Witness, say, Anil Dash's recent post, where he says:

We've created something amazing with the weblog medium. A significantly new medium with a global reach that has had the input of women and people of color as peers since its founding, not just in creating content, but in ownership of the tools and platforms that create the medium, is so revolutionary it sounds like some idealistic pipe dream.

As I said on his site

Huh? Forget about the ridiculous "people of color" term - which groups all 5 billion non-whites under one patronizing umbrella - for just one second. This rationale only flies if you define "women involved" as "women in largely nontechnical positions" and "people of color" as "Indian and Chinese engineers". I'm sorry dude, but it's just wishful thinking to state that blacks, Hispanics, or women were significant players in the internet since its founding . The argument that women are significant contributors to the internet is more credible today as internet access filters down to the masses, but I still think that the black/Hispanic influence on the web is pretty small...

Anyone familiar with the affirmative action lobby will recognize this technique. Asians can be either white or "colored" as is convenient. Ah...that felt better. Blood pressure returning to normal levels... Update: Anil clarifies - his point concerned the weblog medium rather than the internet backbone itself. My point stands, however. Anil said "not just in creating content", implying that a substantial share of technical development was done by women and "people of color". I'm sure there are high profile exceptions among females, but I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that most of the major weblogging applications were coded primarily by males. The "people of color" involved were also probably predominantly South or East Asian - not black or Hispanic. Update 2: Anil says that 2 of the 3 major weblogging apps were developed by 50/50 male female teams. I'm assuming he means Blogger, Movable Type, and Greymatter. Technically speaking, this doesn't disprove what I said - the development was done primarily by males, if primarily means more than 50%. But we need not split rhetorical hairs to prove my point. If we examine the descriptions of each company's founders, we see for MT:

Q. Who makes Movable Type? A. Movable Type is developed by the husband/wife team of Benjamin Trott and Mena G. Trott. Benjamin Trott is a Perl programmer who likes cryptography. He contributes regularly to CPAN (the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) and has written for Perl.com. Mena Grabowski Trott is a designer who publishes her own weblog at dollarshort.org. She won "Best Weblog" in SXSW's 2001 web awards — so, apparently, she must know something about weblogging. Benjamin and Mena are two of the authors of O'Reilly's Essential Blogging, scheduled to be published in August.

and here:

WtW: Tell us a bit about yourselves. Are you programmers? Got any web sites we can look at? Ben: I am a programmer; I've developed other Content Management Systems, primarily for work. Those systems are the more standard, all-encompassing content management systems, whereas MT is focused primarily on weblogs and journals (although this is more of a design perspective than a technical limitation). Mena: I work primarily as a web and UI designer. We currently work at the same company in these same roles so the idea of designating different tasks to each other came quite naturally.

and for Blogger:

Biz: What was the original team? How many people? Ev: Meg "megnut" Hourihan and I started the company in January of '99. Paul "pb" Bausch joined us in May, and it was just us three for the rest of that year. Pb and I built and launched the original version of Blogger in about a week—legend has it—while Meg was on vacation, because she was (wisely) opposed to the idea of diverging our focus. The early part of 2000, both slightly before and right after we got our seed funding, was when we added the rest of the team— which, at its peak, numbered seven.

As far as I can tell, Greymatter is just one male's work. So, let's recap: 1) Blogger coded by two males in a week. Unclear whether Megnut was a programmer or not. 2) MT has male (programmer) and female (content generator/designer). Again, Anil's initial point was that females and "people of color" were contributing "not just content". That means technical stuff - involving a bit of mathematics and a lot of coding. 3) Greymatter coded by one male on his lonesome. Now, I don't know what the composition of that seven member team at Blogger was like. Perhaps it was a tapestry of heteroflexible-handicapped-people-of-color. But were women primarily involved with programming? With "not just content generation"? It's possible because we're dealing with small sample sizes, but somehow I doubt it.In any case, if we expanded the category of "tools for webloggers" to include most programs written for webloggers (such as the LiveJournal source or Dave Winer's Radio), we'd rapidly hit a statistically significant sample of programmers and people involved in "not just content generation". And it's a sure bet that they're primarily male.