Kare Urena and one of her roommates, Isaac Tucker-Rasbury, posted on Facebook that they were looking for another roommate and included the term POC only, meaning “people of color only”, it caused quite the stir.
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KABC reports that the school’s president, Melvin Oliver, responded to the controversy saying the post is “inconsistent with (the) mission and values” of Pitzer College. He says it’s another example of social media being an ineffective platform for complex dialogue on critical issues.
Well, at Pitzer College in California, it depends which senior administrator you ask.
The colleges of Claremont are very highly regarded post-secondary educational facilities in Los Angeles. They create more heat than light and invite extreme viewpoints that intentionally obfuscate the nuanced context that surrounds these issues.
POC stands for person of color. According to data from the college, 48% of Pitzer’s 1,067 undergraduates identified as white.
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Kara Urena and another roommate posted to a private Facebook page seeking a roommate and said they were looking for “POC only”. “I completely understand the desire not to live with people who could be racist, but excluding all white people is an extremely blunt instrument to achieve that end and a harmful overgeneralization”, one person commented. We live in a world where the living circumstances of POC are grounded in racist social structures that we cannot opt out of. Protests were rampant insisting that there be more diversity in student academics and on-campus affairs. “We are fighting to exist”. Um, that’s not what I screamed in that post.
