The BIPOC slide rule

 soundtrack Yann Tierson, Porz Goret
 

A lot of the feedback sent to me today by Aja Barbers supporters after my 3 minutes of havoc being on her Instagram expressed their concern that I was being “violent” towards BIPOC persons. (It was only last week I encountered this acronym; it stands for Black, Indigenous and People of Colour for those that haven’t heard it before). Apparently Aja is in one of those categories and was ferociously defended by her many supporters, though from my brief encounter with her she seemed more than capable of putting me in my place. 

Inevitably this gave rise to me being required to flash my BIPOC credentials, if any. As I pointed out in a blog a few days ago its necessary to identify every ancestor back at least 6 generations on every branch of the family. Then they do the calculations to work out how many litres of coloured blood you have versus the white blood and accordingly you get allocated a position in the pecking order.

I presume this works using some sort of a polarised scale with the 2% of totally white people at one end and the 2% of totally black people at the other. In the middle is us 96% of mixed blood mongreloids.

The tendency of male Homo Sapiens to want to mate with every and any woman they encounter, regardless of race, ethnicity, colour or ability, going right back to the Neanderthals (still got 3% Neanderthal DNA in Homo Sapiens! Though my husband is a teacher and claims there is tribe of pure bloods who attend his school) makes this sorting of the degrees of colouration in each individual as frustrating as what they faced in Apartheid South Africa. And the results are just as farcical.

I am astounded at the irony of these people who claim they are standing up for the rights of BIPOC people when they are the ones running around obsessing about skin colour and racial identity. It is everything to them. They have no script for dealing with anyone who is a blank slate. 

But surely there wouldn’t be any need to fight for BIPOC rights when we are all colour blind? Are BIPOC rights the same as human rights? Why not be fighting for that? The most vile thing of all is to be “white”. White people are racists, oppressors and imperialists. So my ancestors who were Welsh, German and Scots are to be reviled? Along with Italians, Russians and Monrovians, et al? 

So I’m thinking Japanese people qualify as “people of colour”. Why? This is truly not trying to be facetious….why are Japanese “people of colour”? Does this mean they are a separate race and different from me?

Asian people, along with Africans, Inuit and English, developed their characteristic race features because for long millennia most human populations didn’t move around a lot. Interbreeding within small populations in regional areas meant particular DNA traits became dominant, some recessive. Over tens of thousands of years these populations became differentiated by characteristics such as melanin pigment in the skin, hair colour, eye colour, on and on. 

To explain this modern day people fabricated a story about “races” that has no underpinning in science. We are all Homo Sapiens, all Earthlings. My personal belief is that the colour of a persons skin and whatever my guess is at their race is just about the most irrelevant thing I need to know about a person. I’m far more interested in what they are like, what is their story, what are their interests, do they have a sense of humour, what are their favourite shows on Netflix.