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POC (People of Colour), BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) used in North America, BAME (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnics) used in England – these are all roll-off-your-tongue, “woke”, and “politically correct” shorthand terms to define non-White groups in the West. Although these abbreviated group identity markers have gained some popularity and momentum recently, they consistently receive just as much criticism from scholars in the field.

But are these terms as appropriate and “woke” as we have been made to believe?

Here are some of the reasons why I believe we need to stop using them, now!

1. All People Have Colour

This may be obvious, but why is white, which is as much a colour as black or brown, not part of a conversation about the colour of people? The less obvious point is that by focusing on the “colour” of non-White others, we are unknowingly perpetuating the myth of scientific racism, that it is some inherent biological difference in them that is at the root of the problem of discrimination and not forced racial ascription, a social structural system of power and oppression, and more recently, of a racial hierarchy that establishes Whiteness as the standard by which everyone is measured.

2. The Painful History of the Word “Colored”

“Colored” and “People of Colour” have been described as two branches of the same tree. The term harks back to the seemingly bygone age of segregation and exclusion – of Jim Crow laws that were rooted in slavery. “Colored” – a word painted on signs in the American South from the 1870s until the 1960s triggers a painful history for Black people – a group that has seen the longest and most pervasive form of oppression compared to any other non-White group and is reason enough to abolish its use in any form. Although very clearly problematic, some people have pointed to the irony of people of colour being an acceptable term but “coloured” being offensive.

In Britain coloured was the accepted term for dark-complexioned people until the 1960s, but it is now widely accepted as an offensive term. After a British MP (Amber Rudd) used the word coloured woman in a BBC 2 radio interview, Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott criticized the use of the term as “outdated”, “offensive” and a “revealing choice of words” and what resulted was her getting lambasted in the media. However, some other media outlets pointed to the hypocrisy in being able to say woman of colour and not coloured woman, with a Spectator piece claiming “it is funny to think that if Rudd had said woman of colour she’d have been immune to criticism. But she tripped over a shibboleth”. If we continue to use terms that are too closely related to historically offensive terms, we make room for conversations like these that question our arguing over semantics, instead of focusing on the harm caused by offensive language.

3. Not all Racisms are the Same

These acronyms flatten differences, simplify complexities, and come with a significant loss of nuance. All non-White groups do not deal with racial stereotypes, discrimination, and institutional racism in the same way, specifically as Black or indigenous people. However, the terms ‘BAME’, ‘BIPOC’ and ‘Black’ are often detrimentally conflated in media and political narratives to present a misleading claim that our justice, educational, health and class systems perpetrate the same structural oppressions or opportunities across all non-White groups. For example, earlier this year the BBC reported that More BAME (18.3%) undergraduates win places at Oxford University, when in fact the case was not true for Black students (2.6%).

The US criminal justice system is another example of the disproportionate targeting of Black people, with African American women (incarceration rate of 205 per 100,000) being three times as likely as Latinas (60 per 100,000) and six times more likely than White women (34 per 100,000) to face imprisonment. And needless to say, it has become agonizingly obvious by now that Black people (12% of US population) are far more likely than White people (62% of US population) to be targeted and shot by police officers (25% vs. 54 %).

4. What About Invisible Minorities and Visible Majorities?

The term “Visible Minorities” that had replaced “People of Colour” and has been the preferred term in Canada for decades, carries its own shortcomings. The word “visible” is seen to indicate the difference in skin tone and the word “minority” to signify statistically fewer numbers, but the term can also imply a type of smallness and inferior social position. Moreover, the term does not include the very real racial experiences of invisible minorities, e.g. White Christian Arabs or White Muslims who may pass as White in some instances but if donning a headscarf, speaking with an accent or having a Muslim sounding name frequently face Islamophobic hate – a form of racism.

How about “visibly different” people who actually make up the majority of the city they live in yet still face significant barriers? Black Canadians living in Toronto, where visible minorities now comprise 73.3% of the city’s population, are visible majorities that have much lower income rates than the non-visible minorities?/White Canadians (23.9% compared to 12.2%)).

5. The Myth of Intergroup Solidarity

It has now become clearer that these terms do not reflect an empowering intergroup solidarity amongst all non-White communities. Black people remain to be the “ultimate racial other” even amongst non-White communities. For example, in the Arab cultures the terms ‘abd’ and ‘abda’, which actually mean “slave”, are demeaningly used to refer to Black and dark-skinned people in general. The colourism in South Asian communities also reflect the anti-Black racism that persists in non-White communities. In 2015, the Dominican Republic announced that the country would be deporting the “darker skinned” Haitians in an effort to “cleanse” their population. Similarly, Africans being expelled from Israel by its government in 2018 bought to light the anti-Black racism that persists in historically marginalized Jewish communities, even in the West.

The fact of the matter is, Britain, Canada and the US are “post-apartheid” and “post-colonialism” countries, with each group within them having its place in the racial hierarchy and consistently trying to “jostle for position over who stands next to the White man”. The urban term of “White Adjacency” describes how a person coming from a non-White background receives benefits similar to those identified as White, by a measure of their proximity to Whiteness. This way, certain groups like light skinned Asians, who have access to and utilize White privilege, through the model minority myth, contribute to White supremacy and the structural oppression of and systemic racism towards Black people. Anti-Black racism and colourism are a big problem in non-White communities. How then can we lump all non-White groups together into terms that perpetuate this myth of solidarity?

What Term Should We Use Instead? 

Racialized

The term we should be using is Racialized People. Racialization is defined by the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) as “the process by which societies construct races as real, different and unequal in ways that matter to economic, political and social life”. The term is preferred because it acknowledges that the barriers faced by those who have been involuntarily racialized are rooted in the historical and contemporary racial prejudice of society and are not due to their own biological makeup or inherent characteristics.

Considering the unique histories of racialized people in the West and the intersections of their identities, it is also imperative for us to define each group precisely when we are speaking about them e.g. we should say Black American women of Sudanese background rather than just Black Americans -where their immigrant status is erased, or just Sudanese immigrants- where their Blackness is erased, or in both cases where their being women is erased.

But Why Trash the Term?

It may ruffle some feathers, but I am going to take a leap of educated faith here by asking us to dismantle these acronyms all together. By doing so, it removes the ability for people to use an umbrella term as a shorthand and lazy way of giving a false sense of progress for a large group of people with drastically different experiences with and outcomes of discrimination. If for example, Canadians of Filipino background are doing economically better in the workforce (unemployment rate of 5.5%), but Black and Arab people are still facing incredible barriers (unemployment rates of 12.5 & 13.5%), it would be dishonest to suggest there has been a decrease in unemployment rates for BIPOC in the past year.

African Americans are more likely than White Americans to be arrested, are more likely to be convicted and are more likely to experience lengthy prison sentences, they are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated as White adults. But policy makers often point to blanket statistics of BIPOC groups to give a false sense of improvement. For example, if incarceration rates are lower for Americans of Asian background (1.5% whilst making up 5.6 % of population), but remain high for Black Americans (33%, whilst making up 12% of population), it would be dishonest to suggest rates of incarceration for BIPOC are lower than previous years.

In the Canadian context, if incarceration rates are lower for Canadians of Asian background (5.5%, whilst making up 17.7% of the population), but the rates remain disproportionately high for Indigenous people (30%, whilst making up 5% of the population), it would be dishonest to suggest rates of incarceration for BIPOC are lower than previous years.

The experience of non-White communities with racism are clearly worlds apart at times, but rather than comparing suffering and oppressions, it might be wiser and more productive to compare intergroup privilege. This way, those groups that are privileged to some extent can use their position and power to shed light on the oppression faced by other groups. We cannot take shortcuts with our efforts in anti-racism or a “one size fits all” approach towards diversity, equity, and inclusion. Doing so, recklessly erases the specific needs of the most vulnerable communities.

We need to be explicit and focused when talking about historically and newly marginalized groups. Most importantly, we cannot paint all racialized groups with the same brush of DEI. We need to pay attention to the differences rather than the sameness in the experiences of those who are non-White. Afterall, not seeing difference and not seeing colour could be seen as two branches of the same tree.

As institutions clamber to learn about racialized inequalities and barriers and adopt better diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, it is important to recognize the problem with popular labels that denote social groups. Despite their popularity, these terms do more damage than good.