Building off some good discussion in the other thread today. I’m thinking about how can white Hexbear users can be better here, and in leftist spaces, AND when we engage with the broader BIPOC communities? What are we doing wrong, and what can we do that’s better?
And I 100% get that’s it’s not on marginalized folks to explain it to us. I do. It’s just, at this moment I’m trying not to get overwhelmed with feeling like it’s just not possible to make the world better. Not even get us to socialism, just getting things to be a tiny bit better. I don’t know what else to do. So I’m reaching out to my BIPOC comrades with an open hand. If you feel like sharing, please do.
For the white folks, we need to be better. We do. It may not be comfortable to hear, but we do. Maybe we’re not as bad as the libs and the chuds on this but that’s not a valid measuring stick. Come on.
Is there a reason why people say "BIPOC" now instead of "POC"? I thought "people of color" included black and indigenous people.
With the added presumable redundancy, does BIPOC do anything that POC doesn't?
It's to emphasize the central role that anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity play in the conception of race in the US.
I don't see where BIPOC works in a case where POC doesn't. I looked it up before posting my last comment and out of 4 articles I read most of the content emphasizes how it's still a blanket term that you don't want to use when talking about Black-specific or Indigenous-specific issues, and lots of interviewees saying "don't call me poc or bipoc, I'm Black".
What if we called a herpetologist "a STRologist" (one who studies snakes, turtles, and reptiles) becaulse of the central role that snakes and turtles play in human culture?
It's like a Band-aid Invocation of People Of Color.
We can do this for any category, making new redundant names with extra virtue signals included. We can satisfy our thirst for change and novelty by making up all kinds of replacement nouns that probably have a half-life of 7 years. We can devote our energies to making oppressed groups feel more special under imperialist white supremacist patriarchal capitalism, why don't we devote our energies to being efficient and rigorous in destroying it?
That's a lot of dismissive things to say despite not addressing my one-sentence response, lol.
This is exactly the kind of thing that can be exhausting for BIPOC folks, by the way. The urge to have and share opinions rather than listen even a little bit.
So why not be extra considerate, and have something that speaks directly to the variation and degrees of oppression that exist in the historical experiences of people racialized into a periphery? Descendents of Slaves and Victims of Genocides and other People of Color. DOSAVOGAPOC. Or if you're going for semantic rigor, POCIDOSAVOG. Is that not even better in recognizing the shape of our world and the injustice therein?
People Racialized Into A Periphery could be turned into a concise and catchy acronym. People might call it some kind of -ism though.
Because BIPOC is pronounceable and because language is descriptive, not prescriptive. This won out over POC, not some other term, and it's not like it was invented and adopted by some committee.
e: like, even in your head.
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anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity manifest in POC communities as well, especially those that are closer to the whiteness boundary and could theoretically cross it one day
So it's better and sensible to distinguish and specify for the sake of simply acknowledging that basic fact
Why not add a letter so it has a consistent internal logic to it?
BIOPOC- Black, Indigenous, and Other People Of Color. At least that wouldn't sound redundant and disjointed. BIPOC makes it sound like Black and Indigenous people are separate from POC.
Who knows, maybe as soon as 5 years from now people will decide that whatever we're using
feels old and not fresh anymoredoesn't adequately address the historical injustices faced by certain demographics, and we'll add and/or alter another couple letters, and so on."other" people of color is already covered by the POC part of the term, anti-blackness and anti-indigenity are distinguished because white supremacists historically weren't simply preaching to their own, they acquired numerous converts in various poc demographics, thru colonial structures anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity hold a unique salience, they're both global and systemic on pan-continental scales that defies the usual regional structural racism other poc groups encounter
For instance, it makes no sense for me to sit here and pretend my home country (which is non-white) can be covered by the term poc while large portions of the population hold severe anti-black views, so BIPOC becomes a useful term
End of the day the term exists to knowledge the fact white supremacists don't actually have to be white, in fact I'd go as far and assert the majority of white supremacists in the world aren't white
It is also inclusive of "non" PoC ingenious groups (I know some Sorbs who see themselves as PoC via. the anti-slavism etc. and others not, so the BIPoC term is more inclusive), which marginalized by European anti-racism for quite a long time, too. I.e. Sorbs in Germany:
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210615-sorbs-the-ethnic-minority-inside-germany
Plenty of land of the Sorbs was taken in the last hundred years, and not seldom were places in which they lived those in which lignite was mined and thus the whole village destroyed:
https://www.mdr.de/geschichte/ddr/wirtschaft/sorben-lausitz-braunkohle-tagebau-100.html
I am reminded of the flair on the old sub "polishpeoplearepocpolishpeoplearepocpolishpeoplearepocpolishpeoplearepoc"
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I thought that was to inspire legitimacy and avoid looking like Golbat.
These are 4 separate but clearly related categories that work as parts of a group that is named by listing them, and they would work just as well in any order. It would sound weird if it were something like "Lesbians, Transgendered, and Sexual Minorities" where part of the list encompasses the whole.
I recognize how silly it is that I'm pursuing this angle of discussion though.