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The introduction opens with the watershed moment in Eoan’s history, when Verdi’s La Traviata is performed for the first time by an all-colored cast, in 1956. Despite being described as “an unqualified artistic success,” this event laid bare the controversy that surrounded their engagement with Western art music and one that led to the demise of their opera productions twenty years later. The event presents the full spectrum of perspectives on Eoan, which included the many conflicted meanings that opera held for participants and audiences. The notion of “colored identity” as a uniquely South African experience that is different from how American readers understand the concept is discussed.

In 1993, Manning Marable predicted that "in the year 2000, fully one-third of America’s total population will consist of people of color—Latinos, Asian-Americans, Pacific-Americans, American Indians and African Americans." Marable also envisioned that demographic growth would be followed by greater solidarity among diverse minority communities. The latest estimates from the Census Bureau (2018) reveal that the first half of his vision has been fulfilled. Yet whether various minority groups can sometimes share a common identity and sense of solidarity as people of color is a lingering question that has largely escaped researchers’ attention. This is a mistake, I think, and one I hope to rectify in the subsequent chapters of this book. Accordingly, I aim to convince you that despite their unique identities as Black, Asian American, Latino, and so on, members of these distinct minority groups often share an identity as people of color, or what I call PoC ID. My plan for the book involves the wholesale development of a new concept; its appraisal through novel instrumentation; the assessment of its political effects; the isolation of conditions when it matters most; and, just as importantly, the pinpointing of circumstances when it matters less or hardly at all.

This chapter lays out the argument for shifting social identities from the margin to the center of how universities engage with students from historically marginalized groups. It does this by showing that even when minority students intentionally attempt to “move beyond” their social identities and embody a humanist identity, they are regularly tripped up by how they are identified by others, and by the psychic energy they must expend to deny, to themselves, their experiences of prejudice. To some extent, simple demographics predestine particular American racial-ethnic groups to be minorities on college campuses, but the marginalization that Black and Latinx students experience is an institutionally constructed phenomenon. To be minoritized is to be a member of a group that is both less in number and has less power and more stigma than other groups. And it is the combination of being both in the demographic minority and negatively stereotyped—having to interact with peers and professors who hold racialized stereotypes about academic potential—that leads Black and Latinx students in historically White colleges and universities to experience marginalization in ways that implicate both their racial-ethnic and academic identities.

Chapter 5 uses a series of studies called the “I Feel Your Pain” experiments to provide initial evidence about the steadfast influence of PoC ID among distinct racial and ethnic minority groups. The aim of these studies is disarmingly simple: to demonstrate that minorities’ reactions to racial affronts are just as strong and swift when their own racial in-group is involved as when other minority out-groups are entangled, which would provide a sincere testament to their sense of being people of color (cf. Mackie, Smith, and Ray 2008). The pattern emerging from these studies is consistent and robust: Minorities’ support for people of color depends very little on who the aggrieved minority is. Blacks, Asians, and Latinos all come to the support of people of color in equal measure when their own in-group is involved as when other minorities are embroiled. The evidence presented in this chapter firmly establishes a simple point: PoC ID is, in fact, a broadly inclusive, pan-racial category, in line with my theoretical reasoning and in-depth interviews.

In the conclusion, I turn to reviewing and integrating the major empirical findings of my book. Specifically, I discuss their implications for political decision making among racial and ethnic minorities, paying special attention to how the presence and influence of PoC ID complicates and deepens our understanding of politics in a racially diversifying nation. Throughout my discussion, I wrestle with the normative implications raised by the presence of a pan-racial identity that can be bolstered or minimized simply on the basis of perceived commonality or difference.