6 ms·
What's BIPOC?
by olivermarks 6y ago
What's BIPOC?
- olivermarks 6y agoI looked it up - according to the NYT 'black, indigenous people of color'. Based on this shouldn't the correct wording for 'black lives matter' be 'BIPOC lives matter'? Surely people of color and indigenous people are taking offense at this?
- oh_sigh 6y agoIt also somehow places black and indigenous people as not "people of color"(I assume they aren't counting white indigenous people like the Sami).
- wbronitsky 6y agoI'm trying to be as inclusive as I can be, and I have been told that BIPOC is an inclusive term. If there is a better term here, please let me know so I can use it. I was discussing American society in particular, so the Sami might not be relevant. Either way, it would be nice if we could look at my comment as doing what I can to not be offensive, instead of nitpicking an argument that is clearly trying. Instead of tearing it down, do you have another suggestion?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jt0 6y agoThis is an incorrect reading of the term. BIPOC is US-specific. You'd have to look at teachings from Sami activists to see the most useful framing for indigenous erasure in Scandinavia. Also, it does not place black and indigenous people as not POC, the aim is "undoing Native invisibility, anti-Blackness, dismantling white supremacy and advancing racial justice."[0]. It instead centers the two groups who have been the most marginalized in the US. [0] https://www.thebipocproject.org/ https://www.thebipocproject.org/
- oh_sigh 6y agoLimiting yourself to two seems too stringent when it is just a letter in an acronym. There has been huge anti Chinese and anti Japanese sentiment in the US. I may start thebijpoccproject.com to address the invisibility of Asians in the mind of US anti racism advocates.
- kube-system 6y agoCorrect me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think that non-black people of color are disproportionately experiencing police violence at the same rates?
- benmw333 6y agoThey're also not committing the crimes, disproportionately...
- rootusrootus 6y agoI saw someone else here arguing with statistics and apparently police kill a lot of white folks, too, and the rates aren't much different than blacks. What does happen, though, is blacks are disproportionately targeted by police in many other non-lethal-but-still-terrible ways.
- ordinaryradical 6y agoBlack Lives Matter was a movement started specifically about the policing of black people and black communities. I haven’t read about any people groups taking offense at this terminology except for white people who cannot come to accept that, for instance, “save the rainforest” does not mean you don’t care about deforestation generally but rather is meant to draw attention to a very real issue even if you happen to care about the longevity of all forests.
- notadog 6y agoAn acronym for “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color".
- quadrifoliate 6y agoAs a less rhetorical answer, that might help some people if not the OP – as an Asian man in America, I have to worry about people making stupid jokes about my perceived culture, but usually not about getting the police called on me and being shot dead because I'm examining a BB gun that is on sale at Walmart [1] (sometimes, there are exceptions [2]). BIPOC puts this group of people (Black and Indigenous) as a separate group before POC, since they face these challenges of simply surviving in society while doing what most of the "rest of us" consider normal activities. At first I was puzzled about why indigenous people were included, but then realized, for example, that Native Americans are killed in police encounters at a higher rate than any other ethnic group [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_John_Crawford_III https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_John_Crawford_III [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sureshbhai_Patel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sureshbhai_Patel (it's sobering to note that even in this case, Patel had the police called on him because someone thought he was Black) [3] https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/10/us/native-lives-matter/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/10/us/native-lives-matter/index....
- jt0 6y agoAdding to this from the BIPOC Project [0] "We use the term BIPOC to highlight the unique relationship to whiteness that Indigenous and Black (African Americans) people have, which shapes the experiences of and relationship to white supremacy for all people of color within a U.S. context." Not all groups face the same oppression and this term intentionally names the two groups which are systematically the most oppressed in a US context. [0] https://www.thebipocproject.org/ https://www.thebipocproject.org/
- olivermarks 6y agoLooks as if this site and the BIPOC media blitz was launched this month.
- Anthony-G 6y agoThanks for the explanation. As a European observing from afar, I hadn't come across the BIPOC acronym until I started reading this thread. I was also unaware that police violence against native Americans was such big a problem as described in the CNN article.