Today, I could be considered a professional person of color because I’ve worked on race issues for more than 20 years. So colleagues are sometimes surprised that I wasn’t always of color. Until I was 17, I was an Indian immigrant and a “minority.”

The human spirit is flexible enough to hold existing identities while adding elements that help us adapt.

The transformation started in my second year of college. A Black freshman had been beaten by two white football players, sparking the kind of outrage that Black student leaders channeled into a tight campaign for campus policy changes. There had been meetings and a rally, and I had skipped them, just as I had skipped my school’s Third World Transition Program, the pre-orientation for first-year students of color.

One night I was with my friends Yuko, a Japanese national who had grown up partly in California and New York City, and Valerie, a biracial Black woman from middle-class Connecticut. They wanted me to go to the rally scheduled for the next day. I gave them the 1980s version of  “I’m not feeling that.” And they gave me a serious talking-to.

“You’re not a girl,” Yuko said. “You’re a woman. And you’re not a minority, you’re a person of color.” It was time to grow up and go to the rally.

So I went and began to change myself and my relationship to the people around me. My family had emigrated when I was 5 and a half, and I was raised completely apolitical in white, working-class factory towns just as the factories were closing in the early and mid-1970s. It wasn’t so much the rally, exciting as it was, as the subsequent political education that illuminated my life’s context, giving it a certain sense.

I had grown up struggling with the weird mix of pandering (“You’re such a genius like all your people! Let’s skip you to seventh grade!”) and exclusion (none of the white girls showed up to my 13th birthday party) that I would later learn characterized the model-minority experience. Model minorities don’t exist without a foil: the messed-up minority. As my friend Vijay Prashad says, the mainstream role of South Asians in the United States post-1965 is to solve the problem of Black rebellion simply through our supposedly exceptional existence. If I was going to help win a new Third World Center on our campus and later lead multiracial political organizations, I had to expand my identity in a way that tied me to Black people as part of their rebellion, not as the ringer that would suppress it. So I became a person of color.

I’ve been obsessed with this memory for the past year as I’ve struggled to bring together the racial justice and the immigrant rights movements in my own head and with ambitions for our organizations, activists and agendas. The term “people of color” has deep historical roots, not all of them positive. Many confuse it for the clearly negative “colored.” The Oxford English Dictionary finds a usage as early as 1781, and its liberatory origins seem to be in the French colonial reference to “gens de couleur libre,” or free people of color. Racial justice activists here, influenced by radical theorists such as Franz Fanon using it, picked it up in the late 1970s and began to use it widely by the early 80s. A decade later, it was in popular use. Although I couldn’t confirm it, it’s quite possible that socialist feminists of color first used “women of color,” which was then broadened.