Reply to Is BIPOC the new term to use? What happened to just POC?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As a person descended from european immigrants (with classically "white" skin that sunburns) ….

Many posters are making me ridiculously uncomfortable because they are basically advocating for the Paper Bag Test, 2.0  They don't say that of course, but in effect that's how they select who gets to self identify as a "POC" and who doesn't.

Basically, a rule out / rule in test on the explicit basis of physiological features, starting with skin tone.  (super pale skinned Egyptian woman with thin nose and wavy, shiny hair? Nope.  Dark olive skinned Egyptian woman — say, the color of a PAPER BAG — with 4c curls and a wide nose bridge?  YES.).

Yes I understand that this is about self identity, but, it's undeniable that there are multiple posters who want to act as the hall monitor for others' racial labels[/quote]

I 100% agree.

- The multi-racial Jewish poster who has been told a million times that I’m white [/quote]

I know this has been said before, but you can self-identify however you'd like! Really, nobody is stopping you. The reality of our socialized world in which your body exists in, however, is that people will group and label you whether you like it or not. It doesn't really matter how you see yourself out in the world. In terms of how you are treated due to socialized and ingrained collective behaviors, what matters is how the majority of other people (e.g. strangers) group you.

We ALL work off a variety of factors when we categorize others: skin-color, age, gender, weight, etc. This happens in fractions of milliseconds when we encounter someone new. The human brain evolved to efficiently distill and categorize information- that approach is how we managed to stay alive back when rustling leaves could be categorized as "extreme danger" mammoth approaching, or just the sound of a potential rabbit for dinner.

The paper bag test actually refers to colorism, a discriminatory hierarchy existing within the black community. It was originally used as a tool to segregate lighter skinned blacks from darker skinned blacks in fraternities and churches throughout much of the 20th century. It's basically just an extreme exaggeration of what humans already do implicitly in terms of grouping.

You should be uncomfortable! Implicit biases are really, really tough to combat for the very reason that they are so deeply socialized and perpetuated based on our evolution (humans' categorization skills). This is a really fascinating tool that you can use to start testing and combating those implicit racial biases if you're interested: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/user/agg/blindspot/tablet.htm
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