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Monday, February 10, 2020

Of color

Someone in my facebook feed wrote a scholarly article about how Antonio Banderas is not an "actor of color." He posted a link to his article and someone else started arguing with him.

And yet the notion of defining what being "of color" is a meaningless semantic game. We get to coin terms and try to convince others of sharing our delineations of them.  There is always an ideological agenda at play, precisely because we can't fix the definition in non-ideological terms. The whole point of terms like that is to be porous. Skin-color becomes a proxy for ethnic identity, but then we get the absurdity of having to picture someone's exact complexion in our mind in order to place the person. But it is only the existence of racism in the first place that makes this possible.  

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