If you’ve been anywhere near Twitter, or really on the internet at all, you will have heard that the 87th edition of the Academy Awards had its share of presumably well-intentioned but cringeworthy gaffes. 

Neil Patrick Harris poked fun at the fact that the evening was a gathering of the “best and the whitest” Hollywood has to offer — as if the humor itself were redemption for the fact, or perhaps taking a swipe at those who had made the lack of diversity an issue in the weeks preceding the event. (Saturday Night Live did exactly the same during its 40th anniversary celebration recently.)

Patricia Arquette accepted her supporting actress Oscar, talking about how it was time for everyone to support equal rights and equal pay for women ... and then expounded on her statement backstage, making it evident that  her “editorial we” when talking about women didn’t include gay women or women of color.

Sean Penn preceded his announcement that Alejandro Iñárritu’s movie, “Birdman,” had won the Oscar, by asking: “Who gave this son of a bitch his green card?” 

In the twitterstorm that followed Penn’s comment (including the hashtag #Penndejo, coined by comic strip artist Lalo Alcaraz), Iñárritu made haste to clarify that he and Penn are friends, and that he was not insulted by it.

Arquette, too, has made known that it wasn’t her intention to exclude by her comments. 

Days after the fact, many people of color — we — are still talking about it. 

Why?

Some have already answered the why by writing/tweeting/saying that we a) have no sense of humor; b) are on the lookout for every little slip-up and are eternally angry; c) see everything in terms of race.

To those we’d counter: a) reinforcing stereotypes isn’t humor; b) whether you think a slip-up is little or big depends on whether it’s you and your loved ones it falls on; c) actually, we’re “othered” in hundreds of ways in the course of a day, a week, a month — so, yes, we notice.

In this era of ultra-connected disconnectedness, pop culture fandoms that center on television shows, books and comic books, movies and movie stars give us a sense of shared community. Facebook pages are built on this sense of community, as are whole Tumblr followings. Hashtags connect the fans of the Walking Dead, Scandal and Teen Wolf (among many others) in unified devotion on a weekly basis.

So what do we make when this pop culture community reflects back to us that our very real concerns are laughable (Neil Patrick Harris); our contributions, indeed our selves, are invisible (Arquette); and single us out as “other” (Penn)? 

The fact that a white actor invoked a green card when referring to a Mexican director — at a moment when 26 states have sued the government because of an executive action that temporarily offers immigrants relief from deportation, and amid a decade of vitriolic arguments centered on our border with Mexico —  is not insignificant. 

Survey after survey has told us that a majority of non-Latinos in the United States believe most Latinos to be undocumented immigrants. Year after year, we’ve experienced how our accents — like Iñárritu’s, but unlike Benedict Cumberbach’s British one — make it possible (likely) to be stopped or reported to authorities on suspicion of not belonging. Time after time we are accused of participating in what we’re deemed to have no right to participate in, by virtue of our ethnicity.

Like little Mariachi singer Sebastian de la Cruz — a San Antonio native — assumed to be undocumented and bombarded with anti-Mexican tweets when he sang the National Anthem at a Spurs-Miami Heat basketball game.

Like renowned Nuyorican singer Marc Anthony being bombarded with the same sort of anti-Latino tweets when he sang God Bless America at a baseball All-Star game.

Like the recent Puerto Rican winner of the Powerball lottery, whose good fortune set off another twitter tirade of anti-Latino, anti-immigrant sentiment (despite Puerto Ricans being U.S. citizens from birth).

As we see it, it makes no difference if Iñárritu didn’t take offense at Penn’s comment because he knows him well enough not to be offended .... An estimated 36.6 million viewers of the Oscars were made complicit in a joke which makes the status of Latino, Mexican, immigrant — no matter how accomplished — the punchline.

African American National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson — who was introduced at those awards by a friend who also made a joke pointing at her ethnicity — wrote this: “In a few short words, the audience and I were asked to take a step back from everything I’ve ever written, a step back from the power and meaning of the National Book Award, lest we forget, lest I forget, where I came from.”

Penn did the same to Iñárritu (and us) and we cannot afford to let is pass unremarked. Or write it off as a joke.