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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   3058 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 2, 2022

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POC, BIPOC, BAME, and all other euphemistic portmanteau terms the lump together non-white people in white-majority countries. They obscure more than they illuminate and the people the words refer to don't like them.

BIPOC

... pointedly doesn't lump together all the non-white people. 'Black and Indigenous People of Color' (where 'indigenous' can be taken to include people with a substantial Native American ancestry component, thus sweeping up most Latinos who aren't Conquistador-Americans) excludes Asians of both the South Asian and the East Asian persuasion. It's implicitly a catch-all term for 'non-white people who have worse average social outcomes than white people', a PC alternative for what used to be called 'non-Asian minorities'.

... pointedly doesn't lump together all the non-white people. 'Black and Indigenous People of Color' (where 'indigenous' can be taken to include people with a substantial Native American ancestry component, thus sweeping up most Latinos who aren't Conquistador-Americans) excludes Asians of both the South Asian and the East Asian persuasion. It's implicitly a catch-all term for 'non-white people who have worse average social outcomes than white people', a PC alternative for what used to be called 'non-Asian minorities'.

My understanding (I am not American, and BIPOC is obviously meaningless outside North America) confirmed by a quick Google is that BIPOC is supposed to stand for "Black, Indigenous, *and *People of Colour" - i.e. it does lump together all non-whites, but centres Black Americans and American Indians within the lump.

Maybe so, but even then, it is still centring the groups with worse average social outcomes, and downplaying the ones who are more successful than whites.

I particularly hate the term "BIPOC" because, by definition, the ethnicity or ethnicities which are indigenous to a given country vary from country to country. The ethnicity which is indigenous to Sweden are white Swedes, and yet in this context the term "indigenous" is only ever used to refer to non-white people.

In the UK "indigenous" to refer to the white English population is considered to be a racist dog-whistle. Amusingly, there is a deep (as in going back to the 1380's, and still taken seriously as late as the 1980's) tradition of (pre-Wokespeak so it doesn't use the technical terms, but the sentiment is clear) left-wing historical mythology in England which sees the white working class as indigenous and the upper class as settler-colonialists descended from William the Conqueror's knights.

The researchers from the London School of Economics, Dr Neil Cummins and Professor Gregory Clark, said the name checks showed that social mobility in England is hardly greater than in medieval times, and that people inherited their social status even more than they inherit their height.

Dr Cummins said: ‘Just take the names of the Normans who conquered England nearly 1,000 years ago. Surnames such as Baskerville, Darcy, Mandeville and Montgomery are still over-represented at Oxbridge and also among elite occupations such as medicine, law and politics.

‘What is surprising is that between 1800 and 2011 there have been substantial institutional changes in England but no gain in rates of social mobility for society as a whole.’

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2479271/1-000-years-invaded-need-Norman-like-Darcy-Percy-ahead.html

Excuse the Daily Mail link, at least the quotes are from the source.

Of course going down the indigenous rabbit hole in a European country leads you to places where indigenous either doesn't mean anything (mythology) or doesn't mean anything useful to modern society (Neanderthals, out of Africa).

Yes! My company wants to increase the representation of "Indigenous+" in Europe, and make no effort to explain what that means. I'm in Germany, so I assume they want more Neanderthals....

What? I'd assume it means ethnic Germans. I'll be offended if it doesn't. Please let your HR department know I have high expectations of them.

Ha! I'll make sure to pass it along ;), but sadly, it does not appear that that is what they meant...

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