While I waited for my call to a government office to transition from a dozen prompts to scratchy music to a live human (which is not necessarily redundant), I thought how the word “Labels” could be an acronym for Lost, Anxious, Befuddled, Enervated, Listless … Silliness.
For sure, there is a long list of other words which could fit the initial letters, but then too there are practical difficulties in assigning labels. If a person has a father born in Nigeria and a mother from, let’s say, Kansas, they are African-American. And if a person has a father from Barbados and a mother from Sri Lanka, they too are African-American. One must understand slave trade routes to connect with the label.
Elsewhere in the world of labeling, if one desired an interesting exchange of opinions, engage advocates within the LatinX community who will cut the conversation short if they are referred to as Hispanic.
The acronym BIPOC is gaining traction in progressive circles: Black-Indigenous-People-of-Color. If the label is interpreted as having components, it makes no sense. Surely one is not saying that all Blacks are Indigenous. If it is agreed that a Black person is also one of Color, then Black is being repeated in the label. If you can rightly assume there are lots of people of different colors, why single out Black. As for the term Indigenous, is that to be interpreted as a paucity of tangible wealth or does it cover a deficit of hope, of aspiration, of feeling that one belongs in the world.
Of course, what is really meant by the BIPOC designation is poor minorities, almost definitionally those who have been shortchanged by the system. There is no intention to include Caucasians unless perhaps that is the back door reason for including the word “indigenous” even when minimal incremental outreach is aimed in that direction.
The writer has used the label/term “financially challenged” for many years. It gets away from terms like “poor” or “indigenous.” I like it. I have also used “marketable skills” instead of vocational training or career technical education. I like mine better; it gets one away from old definitions and images and connects to the reality: if a kid is a great rapper, he or she has a marketable skill, the same with somebody who can code or comfort a person in need, or a man or woman can take a bunch of wood and convert it into a great chair.
FCPOAC then would be my preference: Financially Challenged People of All Color. But, to take a page from the gecko, FCPOAC not only does not easily fall off the tongue, but phonetically spoken, it represents a problem (or maybe not; after all, the “F” word is now used in a wide variety of circumstances.)
Moving right along —
Ask 100 people: 60 white, 18 LatinX, 14 African-American, 6 Asian and 2 of another label what is meant by the phrase “more diversity” when one reads or hears it in the media.
These are my guesses as to the distribution of answers:
More African-Americans the vast majority of responses
More LatinX a few responses
More Asian virtually no responses
If “social justice” is substituted for “more diversity,” the distribution of responses is probably comparable to that above.
The reasons behind the skewed responses are completely clear. Black Lives Matter and its offshoots have taken center stage, and appropriately so, since the murder of George Floyd.
Looking at the other two leading minorities is an interesting exercise.
There has been an unpublicized assumption that Asians are being fairly treated (only very recently, literally as I was finishing this little essay, was a spotlight put on the mistreatment of Asians). Moreover, there has been a belief that they can take care of themselves, there is minimal history to produce big chunks of guilt among white Americans, and they are okay (more than okay would be the popular view) educationally (discrimination at Harvard is not exactly a mainstream issue) and financially.
Basically Asians have been totally ignored in the diversity discussion.
Where does the LatinX community fit?
In terms of protesting for social justice, they are represented. Beyond that, language and/or accent barriers, documentation issues, and the persistent myth that immigrants take jobs from Americans confuse the picture. The bottom line is that when the long list of organizations (profit-seeking and non-profit alike) who are seeking to prove their bona fides on the issue of diversity decide to create the position of VP-Diversity, it is almost exclusively an African-American who gets selected.
Diversity-Equity-Inclusion advocates will protest the assertion, but by observation, not data, it does not appear that lumping black and brown together has resulted in proportionate gains for African-Americans and LatinX. This generalization undoubtedly needs some contextualization.
It is difficult for LatinX leaders to speak out about this apparent contrast, given the commonality of certain aspects of discrimination, particularly when it comes to employment practices. Unfortunately, however, collaboration can only go so far in today’s world of racial identity separation.
It may be that LatinX advocates will need to mount their own uniquely identified push for more LatinX representation throughout the ranks of organizational America. Perhaps “The Hispanic Promise” (HispanicStar.org) is a good start. It is an “official corporate pledge to prepare, hire, promote, retain, and celebrate Hispanics in the workplace.”
What do rioters, a collection of bystanders to a person being abused, and labels have in common. They are about individuals functioning differently because they are in groups or so identified.
What is my overall point? Simple answer: I dislike labels. Besides, if Rwanda can remove ethnic identity from its government paperwork, maybe we could.