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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The Sierra Club guide is hilarious: https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/default/files/sce-authors/u....

> People of color” has in the past served as a collective term for people who are not white. A preferred term today is “BIPOC” referring to Black, Indigenous and people of color, which provides a unifying term for ease of use while still acknowledging the reality that Black and Indigenous people in the United States are impacted by structural and individual racism in a different way than other people of color.

I love the “first among equals” aspect of BIPOC. It’s literally just white people creating hierarchies of the other races. Again.

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My opinion is the motivation behind “BIPOC” is to exclude Asians, who are rarely considered as minorities due to their economic and academic success.

I think "BIPOC" is designed to be able to exclude or include asians selectively depending on political needs. They want Asians to identify their interests with those of other non-whites, and in opposition to conservative whites. In that context, Asians are "BIPOC." But when it comes to preferential treatment amongst different non-whites, for jobs or admissions, then Asians are in the second-tier of "POC" not the first tier of "BI."

They're also the victim of harassment and hate by primarily other minorities, which makes for an uncomfortable fact.

You're not suppose to say this out loud!

BIPOC absolutely includes Asian- both east and south Asian. I’ve never seen it used otherwise.

Many asian have white or fair skin.

People of Color mainly refers to people with darker skin.

But ofc it depends who you ask.

NAACP stands for "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People". Interesting how "Colored People" was an enlightened term in 1909, but "Colored People" is now out and "People of Color" is the new way to go.

Colored People and People of Color are two different things. Colored People was the polite term for blacks 60+ years ago. People of Color means nonwhite. Also, side point, the founders of NAACP included both black, white, and at least one person (Mary Church Terrell) that we would in 2023 consider mixed race. And initially it was predominately led by white Americans.

As a non native speaker I would have never known this. Learned something today!

This is the way language and respectful culture evolve. Something can both be an improvement over previous terms and imperfect and thus replaced by something more preferable later.

What made the first term imperfect? Who decided what was preferable later?

No one and everyone. Language changes as our world and societies change.

IDK documents such as TFA kind of make it seem like it's not exactly "everyone" making these decisions for us.

No, “people of color” is now in the “past” as Sierra Club says. The “preferred term today” is “BIPOC” which acknowledges that black and indigenous people are more important than other “people of color.” I don’t remember Asians signing off on this change request; I doubt Hispanics did either.

The old phrase is inside the new phrase of course, or at least it is if you try to say it out loud. Or maybe only the initialism is meant to be spoken, I'm not sure. I suspect these kind of situations (BIPOC, Latinx, Xir/Xer etc) occur when terminally online people accustomed to text communication forget that language is spoken too, not just typed. That's why they come up with all these new terms that can be read as text but become unintelligible noise when spoken.

Why are you attributing a ranking to an initialism?

Initialisms apparently naturally have a hierarchy, like when lesbians invented the LGBT and graciously donated the other letters to good causes.

I suppose it would be more similar if it went from "Queer" to "LGPWAQ", as in "Lesbians, gays, and people who are queer".

BIPOC definitely reads like "Black and Indigenous people, and the rest." Which makes sense since the intent of the term is to "center the experiences of Black and Indigenous groups." Can't effectively center something without moving everything else out to the margins.

The ranking is the point of the initialism. Black and indigenous people were already included in the blanket term "people of color," so why introduce BIPOC if not to highlight those groups specifically?

Exactly--and the Sierra Club guide discloses that exact motivation in the part I quoted above.

I find the terms BIPOC and AAPI to be quite erasing. While some black people and indigenous people share some issues and concerns, assigning a new group silences people where they do not align, and nominates spokespeople who might not have support from the community they're supposed to represent.

After all, not all black people have the same concerns and priorities, and there are diverse communities that sometimes butt heads. Combining that group into another reduces the voice even more.

It also permits ignoring the actual community in question for the beliefs of an outsider representative who identifies as BIPOC rather than as just one subgroup. And allows silencing people who disagree with being lumped together by declaring the lack of solidarity a form of racism itself.

Yeah, it could have been IBPOC.

Also, since we are exposing the silliness of all of this -- aren't "black" and "poc" discriminatory to "people who are experiencing albinism" ?

People of Color

Of color black, of color brown, etc

All there is to it is white people inventing words to stake a claim to them.

Are you aghast at the number of points?

It’s referring to two points from “The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation”, which is understandably (I hope), a large (and respected!) guide.

Taken out of their respective roles in the context of the conversation, comparing the Chicago Guide to the Catechism is, admittedly, a really funny comment.

Yes, that went over my head.

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