‘BAME’ isn’t just a meaningless term, it’s grossly insulting

Why is the acronym BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) offensive? Because people of Jamaican origin, Indian origin or Chinese origin are not all the same. Isn’t that obvious?

UK Music, the trade body for musicians, has now said that music companies should stop using BAME and should instead refer to artists’ specific racial heritage if needed. Quite right. BAME is meaningless.

My parents are from the Caribbean and I am black and British, as is a friend of mine whose origins are from Zimbabwe. So it is true that as black women, we have certain things in common. We discuss our hair (Phds are written on the phenomenon that is black hair) among other things that have an impact on black women’s lives. But for the most part, we are very different.

The reason BAME has become a popular term is because of this notion that only non-white people experience racism and that they all experience racism in the same ways. It pits non-whites against whites.

But surely we can see that a Chinese man’s experiences are very different from a Somali woman’s? Racism comes in different forms and white people are not immune from it, either.

A Chinese man might even be at an advantage thanks to stereotyping that might assume that he is more clever than others. Indian people are more likely to suffer from heart disease, but black boys of Caribbean heritage (not African heritage) are more likely to get excluded from school.

In fact, if you ever see a white boy at a majority ethnic school shave his head and deny his heritage because it is decidedly “uncool”, you know instinctively that white people can be subject to the same racial pressures that minorities experience. Racism is far more pervasive than we often realise.

I believe that there is a legitimate discussion to be had regarding structural and institutional racism. Abandoning the term BAME does not mean believing that we live in a post-racial society.

It simply means rejecting the grossly insulting assumption that all nonwhite people are the same. We are human beings, with all the intricate and detailed variety of experiences and thoughts that white people have.

Thankfully, UK Music also wants to end the trend of describing music by black musicians as “urban”. Do the Kanneh-masons (Sheku Kanneh-mason played the cello at the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s wedding) play “urban” music? I will never understand the assumption that all music produced by black people is “urban”. Just like the term BAME, this stuff borders on being racist itself.

We need to stop being intellectually lazy because we enjoy seeing the world as divided between the powerful (white people) and the oppressed (BAME). Describing people accurately, as opposed to labelling them with a political term, allows us to embrace the complexities of life and to see things as they really are, as opposed to how we would like them to be.