Call me Black, not BIPOC
With every generation comes a new name for Black people. Most recently, white people, many of whom, who work for non-profits and in other organizations claim to improve conditions for Black people have adopted a term for this generation.
The term is “BIPOC.” It stands for Black, Indigenous, People of Color. It’s useless. Do not address me this way.
When my ancestors were kidnapped from Africa, shackled and chained to boats and brought to the United States 400 years ago, white slave owners beat us and killed us if we didn’t give up our African customs. They tortured my forefathers for using the names they were born with.
If you’ve ever watched the movie “Roots” by Alex Haley, you’ll see white slave master whipping a Black slave, “Kunta Kinte,” until he submits and calls himself his new white name, “Toby.”
Centuries later in the late 1900s, now very much detached from our African roots, I was named Stacy Graham-Hunt, a name with no traces of African origins, but with English, Scottish and Irish origins instead ... a bunch of heritages that don’t represent me. Other Black people, like Malcom X and Muhummad Ali, changed their names because they had similar sentiments.
To complement the efforts of renaming Black slaves, erasing our African history and creating worldwide systems that have limited the resources of my Black sisters and brothers, white people gave us the derogatory name “n----r.” Then somewhere down the line we became “colored,” “Negro,” “African American” and then “Black.” When there became a need to talk about people who weren’t white as a collective, the term “people of color” was adopted.
There is a constant need to separate white people from every other group of people. The same people who use terms like people of color or “BIPOC” scream for unity and equity, when these terms perpetuate division.
Since police officers killed George Floyd last year (I say officers because while one kneeled on his neck, the other officers did nothing to save his life), white people adopted the term Black, Indigenous, People of Color.
Many people say “BIPOC” for short. The problem with saying “BIPOC” is that it makes it so people who are scared to talk about race don’t have to utter the word “Black” or the other non-white groups. It’s like saying the word “booby” instead of saying the word “breast.”
“BIPOC” erases the identities of the people we’re talking about. A lot of people have never even heard this term ... many of them are Black, as I learned from my conversations about this topic on Facebook, Instagram and Clubhouse.
Quite a few people thought “BIPOC” meant “bisexual people of color,” which I learned from Sandra E. Garcia, a writer for The New York Times. If Black people don’t know that they’re being called BIPOC, that leaves me to wonder who created the term, and I want to know why.
I am against the term “BIPOC.” I am against white organizations and their people taking the liberty of labeling my Blackness however they choose and however it is convenient for them. I don’t like the idea of using useless and insensitive terms just because they are more convenient.
I am for being called “Black.” I am for white people respecting me and asking me how I would like to be addressed, similarly to the way I’m asked to define my gender pronouns in work meetings.
When people are confused about how to talk about race and define it, it makes it hard to eradicate racism. In doing this work, we have to be very clear about what we mean. The better we are at being concise, the better chance we have at facilitating change and actually creating a better world for nonwhite people.