yrgirlkv

"it's yr girl; you already know!"

—dj who is not yr girl and who you do not know at all

sister @cass | mom @pegasus-poetry | writer/designer @ songs for the dusk, sunblack | asexual @ large

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the letters in BIPOC stand for black, indigenous, people/person, of, color. okay great; the term has emerged in the past couple years as a new iteration on POC, "people/person of color."

so if you are BIPOC does that mean you are

  1. a person of color who is black or indigenous?
  2. a person of color or a black person or an indigenous person? this confuses me because black people are already people of color and so are most indigenous people, but maybe this is done for redundancy's sake, and also to cover white-passing1 indigenous people? or for some other reason i'm not understanding?
  3. a secret third thing?

i am an indian-american woman, as in the south asian kind of indian, and i have heard people say "BIPOC" in a way that includes me, but i've also seen occasions where folks who are like, east asian, will say "i'm not BIPOC" and that confuses me because, like, chinese people are still very much of color! genuinely, any clarification appreciated here


  1. "white-passing" probably doesn't strictly cover indigenous groups like the saami but i mean to include them by this


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in reply to @yrgirlkv's post:

2, For the reasons mentioned and as I have been told by people in DEI, it is supposedly meant to highlight the particular experiences of black and indigenous people in an American context. Time is strange and I'm not really sure how often I encountered it pre-2020 but I have a strong sense that I did, at least a few times here in Canada. Never in Trinidad. It does feel like an American made thing, to me.

For me, people of colour was weird at first. It just seemed like "coloured people" phrased differently, because it is, and I learned from watching American media that coloured people is a bad term. I've come to think that I just don't like it when white people use it. POC using poc is fine. Solidarity. If I hear/see white people using it I'm usually also thinking "you could have probably used a different word or say the word you really want to use or you shouldn't be making the generalization you're about to make/are making".

I think the rationale for using "people of colour" over "coloured people" is the structural framing. Putting "people" first centers people primarily, where as "coloured" first emphasizes skin before humanity. The same logic goes for phrases such as "people with disabilities" over "disabled people".

It appears the same, sure, but word order matters in emphasis, so it's easy to see why it'd be adopted. Plus, POC abbreviates very cleanly.

The point about using "POC" over something more specific is totally correct, of course. It's an umbrella term; if someone were talking about, say, Southeast Asians it'd be at best silly and possibly downright offensive to frame it as "POC". But umbrella terms have their uses too, and it seems far better to use POC or BIPOC over "non-white", which goes back to othering (there's probably another term I'm forgetting, but it's early for me and my brain's barely spinning up).

to echo what roberts said, yes, while its exact point of origin is unclear (the earliest recorded usage is supposedly in this tweet from a canadian account from 2013) it is most commonly understood to be an umbrella term that also specifically centers the importance of black and indigenous experiences within that larger umbrella / highlights the specific struggles of black and indigenous people in the past and present of north american settler colonialism. and while a broad term can sometimes be useful in particular contexts it often becomes a pitfall when more specific language would be better or, for instance, where you end up with bipoc being the primary term used to discuss a pattern of racism affecting a group of people of color that doesn't include any black or indigenous people, in which case it begins to feel like it's obfuscating or misrepresenting a discussion more than centering one. and this problem gets compounded when people are using it inconsistently based on different reads of what they assume it means