People of Color

I refuse to be identified as part of this group. BIPOC, you can have that shit too.

Stop lumping Black people in with every other ethnicity or every other disenfranchised group. Y’all don’t get to absorb us into your struggle to be recognized as human. The fight against those who have vowed to strip you of your humanity should be your own.

Black people have been battling whiteness since whiteness was invented and used as a rationale for the horrors this country subjected us to in the name of superiority. We have been at war for our humanity since day one in America. We have been fighting for civil rights since the Civil War. We have been beaten, raped, murdered, and lynched by one group of people who identified as white and built systems to preserve that power.

Black people are the number one target of racism in America.

Racism here was designed around BLACK people. Voter suppression has always centered BLACK people. Redistricting and gerrymandering are sharpened to weaken BLACK voting power. The prison system, housing discrimination, education gaps, policing, every one of those systems carries our fingerprints because they were designed with us in mind.

Non-Black immigrants, basically anybody not considered white, have often been handed the same message in this country: “It could be worse. At least you’re not Black.”

And too often, as soon as acceptance gets close, as soon as assimilation offers a seat at the table or the privilege of being white-adjacent, some start using the same language against us. Start calling us the n-word too. We’ve got enough of that in our own ranks. Jay-Z said it plain: “I’m not Black, I’m O.J.” …OK.

But here’s what also needs to be said.

To POC. To BIPOC. To LGBTQ+. To immigrants. To disabled folks. To anybody whose humanity gets ranked based on skin color, religion, accent, age, gender, ability, or who you love.

Black people are the architects of the fight.

Black people are the blueprint.

Black people wrote the playbook.

And if it wasn’t a winning strategy, they wouldn’t spend so much time, money, legislation, court cases, and propaganda trying to suppress our humanity and roll our rights backward.

The victories against racism and blatant discrimination sit like trophies on our mantel.

Civil Rights Act of 1866.
Civil Rights Act of 1870.
Civil Rights Act of 1871.
Civil Rights Act of 1875.

A championship run interrupted by Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan.

Then we fought back again after thousands of us were hanging from trees while the most dangerous people on earth smiled in the foreground, and a little boy named Emmett Till had his body pulled from the Tallahatchie River.

Civil Rights Act of 1957.
Civil Rights Act of 1960.
Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Civil Rights Act of 1968, passed in the shadow of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr..

Every one of those victories was necessary because the one disqualifier for consideration as fully human in this country was, and still often is, the color of our skin. Our BLACK skin.

And those tools didn’t stay contained.

The legal arguments behind equal access became part of the fight for disability rights and helped shape protections later strengthened by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

Equal-protection arguments opened doors against age discrimination.

The constitutional groundwork helped make victories like marriage equality possible.

That matters.

Because none of those wins came from nowhere.

They were sharpened in our struggle.

Forged in our blood.

Tested in our communities.

Paid for by our ancestors.

So no, I don’t want to disappear into a label that blurs all of that together.

That discounts our fight.

That erases what it cost us just to exist.

That doesn’t mean I’m against anybody.

Not at all.

We absolutely have a common enemy.

And the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

We are allies.

We will share the tools.

We will hand you the blueprint.

We will show you the strategy our ancestors bled and died building.

And if every community attacks this thing from multiple sides, if every group flanks the monster and surrounds it, then we all win.

And maybe when the work is finally done, when the monster falls and nobody’s humanity needs defending anymore, there will be no categories left to sort us.

No rankings.

No hierarchy.

No Black. No white. No “other.”

Just human.