Ethnicity, Race + Nationality

“Articles

“After 50 Years of ‘Asian American,’ Advocates Say the Term Is ‘More Essential Than Ever'” | NBC News

“All Mixed Up: What Do We Call People of Multiple Backgrounds?” | NPR

• The history of mixed race, multiracial, biracial, and other terms

“American Indians Are Not ‘People of Color'” | ASCD

“AP Stylebook Update: It’s OK to Call Something Racist When It’s Racist” | Poynter

“Arabs, the N-Word and the A-Word Are the Same” | Muslim Girl

“Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, a Missing Minority in Criminal Justice Data” | Urban Wire

• Categorizing Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as “other” in the criminal justice system fails to acknowledge the vast disparities within the group and feeds the harmful “model minority” myth.

“Asians Are Good at Math? Why Dressing Up Racism as a Compliment Just Doesn’t Add Up” | The Conversation

• Jokes about Asians being good at math “might seem funny at first, but the underlying message is clear: Asian people aren’t seen as human beings; they are calculating machines…In other words, they are dehumanized.”

“Awkward, Uncomfortable Conversations About Racism Worth It” | USA Today

• Tips on addressing racism with someone who was racially offensive or insensitive

“Blackhorse: Do You Prefer ‘Native American’ or ‘American Indian’? 6 Prominent Voices Respond” | Indian Country Today Media Network

• Different perspectives on the terms Native, indigenous, Native American, American Indian, Indian, and First American, and the preference for tribal references

“Can La Cocina’s Food-Focused Conference Help Grow Equitable Communities?” | KQED

“‘Expat’ and the Fraught Language of Migration” | The Atlantic”

“Feminism and Race: Just Who Counts as a ‘Woman of Color’?” | NPR

“‘Foreign’ Lands Are Not Foreign in a Globalized World—and It Is Time International News Media Realized This” | Nieman Reports

• “When news cameras document foreign tragedy, it is argued that these kinds of ‘unsettling’ images should be shown precisely because they harness the horror, but pictures documenting American bodies are actually condemned for being disturbing.” —Jessica M. Fishman, in Death Makes the News

“Github Plans to Replace Racially Insensitive Terms Like ‘Master’ and ‘Whitelist’” | The Next Web

“A Historically Xenophobic Metaphor Has Been Used by Trump, Limbaugh, Obama—and Us?” | Public Radio International

• When immigrants of color are described as “pouring in,” “swamping,” “flooding in,” or as “coming in ‘tides’ and ‘waves.’”

“How the Design Industry Can Confront Racist Terminology” | Architectural Digest

“How to Query a Racist Comment” | Copyediting

“Integrating Non-English Words Into Academic Writing” | University Affairs

“Is It Time to Reclaim the Word ‘Nappy’?” | Allure

“Latina/o/x” | Inside Higher Ed

• The need for an inclusive, non-gender-conforming term for Latina and Latino
• The arguments against using an x

Multicultural Romance: When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong: Do’s, Don’ts, and Why Nots! [PDF] | Alyssa Cole, Lena Hart, K. M. Jackson, Falguni Kothari

“New Latinx Generation Embraces the Code-Switching Identity Once Derided as ‘Pocho’” | Borderzine

“‘Obama’s People’ and ‘the African Americans’: Using the Language of Othering | The Huffington Post

• How use of the word the before any racial group creates distance and puts them in one monolithic category

“100 Ways to Support—Not Appropriate From—Native People” | Broadly

• On the use of powwow, squaw, “go off the reservation,” and other offensive language.

“The Racist Politics of the English Language” | Boston Review

• “Why the semantic somersaults when it comes to race? We never hear anti-Semitic rhetoric described as ‘religiously tinged.’”

“Research Says There Are Ways to Reduce Racial Bias. Calling People Racist Isn’t One of Them.” | Vox

• “In 2016, researchers stumbled on a radical tactic for reducing another person’s bigotry: a frank, brief conversation.”

“Stop Calling Black Women ‘Superheroes'” | Dame

“Stop Saying This Is a Nation of Immigrants!” | Colorlines

“Study: U.S. Newspapers Are More Than Twice as Likely to Cite Israeli Sources in Headlines Than Palestinian Ones” | The Intercept

• “The firm analyzed nearly 100,000 news headlines about the conflict in the American press over the past five decades and found that the Israeli point of view was featured much more prominently than the Palestinian one, and that references to Palestinians’ experiences of being ‘refugees’ or living under ‘occupation’ have steadily declined.”

“Talk Like a Human: 8 Phrases to Avoid Saying to Your Customers” | Zapier

“There Is No Secret to Writing About People Who Do Not Look Like You” | Literary Hub

• The role of empathy in writing the “other” as well as you write the “self”

“To Change Racial Disparity in Food, Let’s Start With Cookbooks” | Eater

“Tony Dungy: Some Announcers’ Biased Language Perpetuates Black QB Stereotypes” | The Undefeated

• “The position that needs the most change might be the broadcast booth. That’s where African-American quarterbacks are still described more for their physicality than intellect.”

“We Should Stop Saying ‘People of Color’ When We Mean ‘Black People'” | Medium

“What International Coverage of Tiananmen Got Wrong” | Columbia Journalism Review

• “The reporters did not create a safe space for people to speak…This kind of journalistic practice is actually not about Tiananmen, but a conscious—and stylistic—choice that is commonly adopted to frame ignorance and silence.” —Tony Lin, video journalist, Quartz

“What to Say When You’re Asian American and Someone Calls You ‘Exotic'” | Public Radio International

“What We Get Wrong About “People of Color” | Wired

• “Broad, all-inclusive sweeps are convenient and comfortable—and sometimes, for the sake of progress, we need them—but they can also do great damage.”

“White People Are Still Raised to Be Racially Illiterate. If We Don’t Recognize the System, Our Inaction Will Uphold It.” | Think

“Why Being ‘Gypped’ Hurts The Roma More Than It Hurts You” | NPR

• “I encounter a lot of people who tell me that they never knew the word ‘gypped’ had anything to do with gypsies, or that it’s offensive—especially when the word is heard not read. My response to them is, That’s okay. You didn’t know but now you do. So stop using it. It may mean nothing to you, but when we hear it, it still hurts.” —Ian Hancock, professor, University of Texas at Austin

“Why Calling Israel an Apartheid State Is Not Enough” | Middle East Eye

• “The report [from B’Tselem, a leading human rights group in Israel] found that Israel meets the definition of apartheid under international law, which defines apartheid as ‘inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.'”

“Why I Don’t Refer to My Hair as ‘Dreadlocks’” | Vogue

“Why Student Group MEChA’s Proposed Name Change Has Set Off a Fierce, Multi-Generational Debate” | Remezcla

• “These proposed shifts in language…remind us that there has never been consensus around the terms that should define our complex communities.”

“Why the Term ‘BIPOC’ Is So Complicated, Explained by Linguists” | Vox

• “When people find themselves struggling to find the best language to talk about identities, [PhD linguistics student deandre miles-hercules] argues that they should think more critically about what exactly they are trying to say.”

“Why We Need to Confront Bias in Dance Criticism” | Dance

• “Artists of color endure reviews that are often reductive or dismissive, especially when the work is ‘foreign’ to the critic.”

“Why We Use ‘Indigenous’ Instead of ‘Aboriginal'” | Animikii