People of Color, PoC, BIPoC
The terms Black People, Indigenous People and People of Color (in the singular Person of Color) are a self-designation of people who experience racism.
The term has been used in this sense since the US civil rights movement in the 1960s. As a reappropriation and positive reinterpretation of the pejorative attribution “colored”, People of Color describes a solidary alliance of different communities that experience structural exclusion due to racism.
With reference to this idea of solidarity, marginalized communities in Germany and other countries of the Global North have also increasingly used the self-designation People of Color in recent decades to refer to a shared experience of racism. By using this term, they consciously distinguish themselves from terms such as migrant or migrant background, which focus linguistically on the experience of migration and do not address the racism experienced. Since not all people with a migration background experience racism (for example, white migrants from certain EU countries) and many people experience racism who statistically do not have a migration background (statistically, a migration background only exists for immigrants and their first and second generation descendants), the term is not very meaningful in relation to the topic of discrimination.
The term PoC is also used in conjunction with the term white.
The experiences of racism of people who identify with the term can be very different. Many communities use other self-designations in addition to the term People of Color or instead, for example the term Black (with a capital B), which people who are part of the African diaspora use as a self-designation. Or Rom*nija, a self-designation used by members of the Roma community.
Like Black or white, the term PoC does not describe shades of skin. It is about marginalization due to racism. In Germany, this therefore includes people from the African, Asian or Latin American diaspora. A Eurocentric, racializing view plays a role here, which is a consequence of the former, unresolved colonization of many countries.
Especially in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests in the 2020s, the abbreviation BIPoC has gained in importance to emphasize that not all non-white people experience the same discrimination.
However, Orientalism also contributes to the constant reproduction of stereotypes. This is why people of Turkish and Arab origin, for example, also experience racism on the job and housing market, in education and also in the cultural sector due to their (ascribed) culture or religion.
In German, there is currently no equivalent for the term People of Color/PoC.
Other words that attempt to translate the term into German are foreign terms with a mostly racist history and should therefore not be used.
Source: Diversity Arts Culture