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BIPOC (Black and Indigenous People of Color)

Social Justice Usage

Source: The BIPOC Project, mission statement

The BIPOC Project aims to build authentic and lasting solidarity among Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), in order to undo Native invisibility, anti-Blackness, dismantle white supremacy and advance racial justice.

We use the term BIPOC to highlight the unique relationship to whiteness that Indigenous and Black (African Americans) people have, which shapes the experiences of and relationship to white supremacy for all people of color within a U.S. context. We unapologetically focus on and center relationships among BIPOC folks.

New Discourses Commentary

“BIPOC” is an acronym that stands for one or both of either “Black and Indigenous People of Color” or “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color,” depending on the author and the context. (It is also sometimes rendered “IBPOC,” with the clearly analogous meanings.) It is, in that sense, clearly a refinement of the broader acronym “POC,” for people of color. In both cases, the additional letters have been added to draw attention to and to specify that black and indigenous people are in a higher category of oppression than other people of color, which advocates of the term believe is erased by a catch-all term for non-white people. In fact, part of the reason for BIPOC existing at all is an argument that “people of color” was a term created by white people specifically so that they could ignore the important differences in oppression between different non-white identity groups and lump them all into a single “non-white” category to be set against whiteness. (This is likely to be partially true—it may have been created by white people, probably at the demands of not-white people—and mostly false—it was more likely created to satisfy a set of linguistic demands under a broad rubric of “political correctness” and not to willfully ignore racial differences as an intentional act of white domination.)

As a term, “BIPOC” is therefore easily understood. It is, in the first meaning, those “people of color” who are specifically black and/or indigenous. In the second, it is all people of color with extra attention drawn to black and indigenous groups. In both cases, the point is clearly to highlight black and indigenous status within or against “of color” status. The need, according to the Theory of Critical Social Justice, for such a specific designation, however, may require some explanation. Despite being nominally anti-hierarchical, Critical Social Justice is absolutely obsessed with the hierarchy of privilege and oppression in society (see also, systemic power), which it attempts to understand with intersectionality and articulate in the Matrix of Domination. Indeed, it would be approximately correct to say that reifying and analyzing this identity hierarchy in exquisite detail is the raison d’etre for Critical Social Justice (see also, conflict theory and Cultural Marxism).

This obsession with racial hierarchy is so pointed that anything that could possibly take away from the recognition of a relevant privilege (to be identified, problematized, disrupted, and dismantled) or oppression (to be liberated from and, in the meantime, used as collateral for applying positional standpoint epistemology) is itself something that is profoundly problematic and, in all likelihood, a hallmark of the specific problem of being privileged enough to be able to ignore it. Thus, though an artifact of political correctness culture itself, the term “people of color” is a problematic term that obscures the uniquely severe oppression of black and indigenous people and, in the name of solidarity, would prevent criticism of the relative privilege of other racial minorities (see also, brown privilege, brown complicity, brown fragility, and model minority). Clearly, given the workings of intersectionality, this demands correction, and thus we get BIPOC (the relative victimhood status battle between the B and the I is ongoing, despite the clear victory of the B and the I over the rest of the POC).

In this sense, “BIPOC” is a necessary consequence of intersectionality and, potentially, a first step in an “alphabet people”-style expansion of the acronym to indicate relative status within the Matrix of Domination. (Hence, we see the disagreement between “BIPOC” and “IBPOC,” despite the fact that both acronyms refer to the same group of people.) That is, like how the LGBT acronym has, in some cases, expanded to include dozens of letters and some symbols (like “+”), all arranged in a particular order that is only ever (mostly) stable in the L, G, B, and T (probably for branding reasons) and partially reflects relative levels of privilege and oppression otherwise, it is possible that “BIPOC” could expand to codify in a useless acronym more (or, in theory, all) non-white racial categories with the order in which the letters are listed reflecting relative privilege levels in the racial hierarchy Theory insists it is not establishing.

See also, people of color.

Related Terms

Brown complicity; Brown fragility; Brown privilege; Conflict theory; Critical; Cultural Marxism; Dismantle; Disrupt; Erasure; Identity; Indigeneity; Intersectionality; Liberation; Matrix of Domination; Model minority; Oppression; People of color; Political correctness; Positionality; Power (systemic); Privilege; Problematic; Problematize; Social Justice; Solidarity; Standpoint epistemology; Theory; Truth; Victimhood; White; Whiteness; Willful ignorance

Revision date: 11/5/20

⇐ Back to Translations from the Wokish

James Lindsay
8 comments
  1. Keri Hamilton says:
    May 3, 2023 at 9:54 pm

    BIPOC is a slur. Blk Americans are NOT the same as Ethiopian or Jamaican or Haitian or Honduran etc.

    We never asked to be lumped in with ppl who DO NOT have similar history. They are immigrants, in the case of the red native American and the Chinese/Thai , jewish allo owned SLAVES. Blk Americans were those slaves. How are those things similar? You lump everyone together to erase Blk Americans. It’s like a prison number. We were reclassified from Indian, Black, Negro, African American, mulatto, not in that order. we are assigned the lable minority and now we are supposed to accept a series of letters in place of our names. POC then BIPOC.
    How do other groups feel about being identified by numbers or letters? BIPOC is okay, if you have a goal of erasing Blk Americans. Do you think the red natives got paid for scalps with straight hair like theirs or kinky hair like blk Americans?

    We don’t have a history of violent ownership of people. We don’t have any history harming any other group anywhere as a group. That’s a difference that can’t be ignored.

    Reply
  2. Nigel Bagguley says:
    August 19, 2022 at 1:05 am

    BIPOC is gaining traction here in England,but as someone of Celtic/Anglo-Saxon heritage I am now denied my Indigenous heritage, because being white is no longer indigenous.

    Reply
  3. David Desroches says:
    April 5, 2022 at 6:53 pm

    Your presentation has all the hallmarks of academia. Future publications many years from now may place your work in a section of history books…that will deal with the mental confusion caused by economic collapse.

    Reply
  4. Jorgensen Shmorgensen says:
    December 6, 2021 at 10:03 am

    a commenter asked: “What could conceivably be the “branding reasons” for the ordering of “L, G, B, and T”?”

    Gay History Lesson 101 (from an old “lived experience” expert). Fasten your seat belt.

    prior to 1970: Homosexual men not yet “Gay” but just in hiding among the crowd, contacting one another in secret as happened for thousands of years.

    1970s: Gay Lib (followed from black Civil Rights and women’s Feminism). Originally all homosexuals were just G — Gay — to cover both gay men and lesbians.

    1980s early: The lesbians screamed “patriarchy” and Gay became LG with lesbians first (ladies first or they’ll cut you!). All still just homosexuals, male and female.

    1980s late: Then the bisexuals (who were almost all women whose leering menfolk demanded threesome partytime with another chick because they read about it in Penthouse and Hustler mags) so the B was hatched and these hippie-wigged hipsters demanded the B be added to the LG. So homosexuals had to add “bisexuality” (Bi theme song: Bi-Bi Birdie, you’ve got a lot of livin’ to do! Bi theme movie: I am Bi-Curious Yellow — old “bi” jokes from the 80s.)

    1990s: Then TT was force-added by university and non-profit leftist wimmin’s collectives for transexuals and transgendered. Transsexuals were a small but known group of medical oddities, but “transgender” was never clear to me or any gay man I knew back then — it seemed to be a wymmin’s thing. Soon the transgender T (hetero men in dresses) kicked out the transexual T (medical hermaphrodites) and no one but the transsexuals noticed.

    2000 Queer Year Zero: Around the time the B and T(T) were added, normal hipsters noticed how cool this all was becoming and leftist/globalist political groups noticed how ripe this all was for power manipulation, so they started making up and adding endless identity-fetish letters which became preposterous but very politically useful. This coincided (not coincidentally) with the spawning of Queer Theory. Thus the alphabet list was shortened to plain old Queer, spelled with a capital letter to differentiate the lower-case version of the same word used for centuries to slur off f-gs as in “f-ing c-s-ing queers”. Most older gay men hated and still hate the term Queer because to them it will always be the plain old slur “queer”. But the Queer Hall Putsch declared all gay men as white oppressors so screw them and their assimilationist white privilege. The Queer Identity Power Games had been launched to blitzkrieg the Western world into Globalist submission.

    Now, in the 21st century, the former LGB has all been transjacked into an identity clown show as a cover for its totalitarian useful idiot actual purpose in the creation of Globalist Feudalism. Queer is is now called POC/WOC-SOGI — people or women of colour (why not people or women of texture?), sexual orientation, and gender identity . This is used to indoctrinate and build an identity army of all humans who are not “straight white men” who have been scapegoated/Goldsteined as the newly powerful PWOCSOGIs’ oppressors even when the P-SOGs are rich and powerful and jackbooting the faces of the white underclasses.

    post-script note of interest: Many people wonder why the Queers would side with mohameddan and other non-white/non-Western anti-homosexual conservative groups — seems illogical — but it’s not just for “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” leftist/globalist reasons — the real reason is that mohameddans and the others have long “cured” homosexuality by transforming it into transgenderism — two regular male men together will be put to death as queers — but if one of the men becomes a “woman” then it’s not homosexuality — it’s “Queer” normal and is OK. This is why a leader of Iran recently said Iran has no homosexuals and the US audience laughed — but he was being culturally factual and the audience was ignorant of these facts — Iran gives homos the “option” of punishment/death or forced sex change — once the queer is a “woman”, the homosexual disappears. This non-Western use of transgendering as social engineering is why the transgender movement is now the new gay in the West — because all the migrants and immigrants brought it as a cultural gift to the West and the Leftist/Globalists saw it as a Trojan Horse to use to smash Western society. And it worked.

    2021: Now any regular gay male-male men who are homosexuals just vanish back into the crowd, invisible, and return to secretly being with one another in hiding as they’ve done for thousands of years. After 50 years, we are back exactly where we started for the “G” before this whole thing happened.

    The End.

    Reply
  5. LR says:
    December 5, 2021 at 10:41 pm

    Well, I speak English. And this stuff sounds like Latin to me! 🤪

    Reply
  6. Andy Jarman says:
    August 6, 2021 at 8:10 am

    OMG, what are the English supposed to do with this? Whose more oppressed the migrant non white or the indigenous whitey?

    Recently it’s been revealed indigenous Britons are faring less well academically than African, South Asian and Chinese migrants .

    And yet the woke are still ‘decolonising’ the curriculum.

    Reply
  7. David Queen says:
    August 4, 2021 at 11:40 pm

    What could conceivably be the “branding reasons” for the ordering of “L, G, B, and T”?

    Reply
  8. Daniel Gluck says:
    April 5, 2021 at 6:48 am

    Thanks goodness for you James Lindsay. You are a national treasure in this sinister clown world. Please keep up the incredible work!!!!

    Reply

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