And I've called out students in my class who use the term. "Oreo" is as bad as "burnt toast".
It conflates separate things, race and culture and sometimes language, and says that they *must* be the same thing as skin color--with skin color calling the shots. You aren't your character, you're not your culture, your aspirations. You aren't you. You're the representative of a group defined by something biologically superficial. You are the melanin content of your skin and that dictates who you must be and who you must want to be. It dictates your friends, your food, your fashion. You must conform. It's a group boundary kind of thing for the vestigially minded.
One guy I knew in student gov was black and had mostly given up on having black friends. He was fed up with them. They criticized him for not speaking right. For not listening to the right music. For not eating the right food. For having too many white friends. For pursuing education research that didn't seem to speak to the needs of African-American students. For not fitting in like a zombie. They said he wasn't a real African-American and he laughed and said they were finally right about something. He was Dutch-Guyanese. He spoke fluent Sranan and Dutch and had spent more time in Amsterdam than he had in the US, but was born and raised in Guyana. He was getting his degree so he could go back and work in the Guyanese ed system--in which the needs of African-American students weren't exactly pressing. They had more universal needs. But he was black and had a decent American accent, thanks to American School and spending time in the US as a kid. They assumed he was "African-American" and, well, that meant he had to conform or be seen as turning his back on "the community". He wanted to be himself, a Dutch-American-Guyanese grad student who liked Creole-Dutch food but his "peers" rejected the idea. And these were the people proudly proclaimed themselves as the defenders of diversity?
A girl in a class I was teaching was ridiculed for her clothes, food, attitudes. "You're not one of us," one of the African-Americans in the class told her with more than a little contempt. She had finally had enough after a couple of months and told the guy to go screw himself, he was right, she *wasn't* one of them and given how they treated her she didn't *want* to be one of them. She was Jamaican, and that meant she wasn't African-American by birth or culture or language. She bluntly said that she didn't have their hang-ups and wanted no part of them, thank you. That said, she wound up by the end of the year having a rather large spectrum of friends. But just as some whites wouldn't have much to do with her, some blacks wouldn't either.
A public health friend in stu gov was going to the Balkans to help people so he was learning Serbian. His fellow SE Asian students were surprised. As an Asian, his first responsibilty was to help Asians, they told him. He responded that he wanted to work in public health, not Asian public health, and to help people, not just Asians. He was a banana. He didn't pick his friends, culture, attitudes, and priorities based on something so thoroughly important as his skin color. Aside, he also said he didn't want to go back to Vietnam--he had had too many relatives killed there/ or vanish in re-education camps. His family had been boat people.
I don't like racial conformity requirements. I find they violate both my religious and my ideological principles. And I don't care what the skin color of the bigot is that's trying to impose them.
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