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Comment by ShredKazoo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Why are you attributing a ranking to an initialism?

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.

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 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.

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.

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