Call me by my name: Why “BIPOC” falls short
I once read an article that spoke about the cultural disrespect of mispronouncing a Black, Latinx Asian American, Pacific Islander, and mixed-race student’s name. The authors categorized the mispronunciation as racial microaggressions. A term many of us know doesn’t feel micro at all. We want people to call us by our given names, we expect people to call us by our correct pronouns, we require people to call us doctors after medical school, and yet we have reduced multiple ethnicities into five letters, “BIPOC.”
The term BIPOC refers to Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color. While it may be a step above its predecessor, People of Color (POC), it still fails to take action against the system it was hoping to disrupt. BIPOC is a radical way of acknowledging marginalized groups in the media — showing a person’s level of “wokeness” and social understanding. However, these letters of recognition only minimize the groups they represent. While POC described anyone who was not White, BIPOC emphasizes shared trauma between Black and Indigenous people as they exist in White Supremacy — leaving Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and the Latinx community within an invisible frame. The term, in short, limits the exploration of trauma and experiences associated with White supremacy, and its aggregation does not allow for the consideration of intergroup relationships. Further, it contributes to the othering of groups who are not considered the dominant culture. Thus, the attempt to escape the Black-White binary becomes a White-Other binary.
As a child, you may have heard the song “Jesus loves the Little Children.” In the song, there is a line, “Red and Yellow, Black and White, they are precious in His sight,” the song alludes to Indigenous, Asian American, Pacific Islander, and Black people while leaving out Brown or Latinx individuals. By reducing communities to colors, we are feeding into the social construct of race. The song originates back to the 1800s, and in 2021 it feels as if we’ve come full circle. We’ve always had our unique colors, but even then, someone was still left out.
My question is, who is BIPOC for? Is it to cut down on the number of characters on a tweet? Or to keep run time for a quippy CNN host down? Does it move the fight forward when we are one group? Yes, we are bonded by trauma, but it’s different, historically and systemically, for each group; we are not a monolith. When we don’t say Black or Indigenous or Asian American or Pacific Islander or Latinx, we also erase the rich culture and traditions each group has to offer. Students should not have a unit of BIPOC history; they should be learning about Indigenous history, given we are on stolen land. They should be learning about Asian history beyond the model minority myth and beyond 2 or 3 countries. They should be learning about Black arts and self-sustaining societies, not just enslavement and Martin Luther King Jr. They should be learning about the histories of Latinx people and the difference between Latinx and Hispanic. They should be exploring the beauty of culture, not just the stereotypes. So let’s acknowledge the diversity of each ethnic group and call them by their name.
#RevolutionaryLearning
