I never respond to other people’s stories, but this is bothering me, so I will put in my two cents.

As a black person, I find this term not only impractical, grammatically odd (“black, indigenous, and people of color” just doesn’t make sense), disingenuous, and America-centric, but unnecessarily alienating. Black and (when applicable) Indigenous people are people of color. “PoC” (not “PoC’s,” not “PoC people” this term is already plural with context!) literally just means “people who aren’t white.” If we want to talk about specific racial experiences, we can just… state the races. Is a black person not a person of color until they’re mixed with another nonwhite race? I feel like this additional separation from other PoC is even more troublesome for mixed black people.

As a black person who knows Indigenous Americans (and knows about Indigeneity in other countries), “indigenous” doesn’t have a singular meaning. In fact, in some countries, Indigenous people are white (which is why I say “BIPoC” is America-centric; there are even Native Americans who don’t consider themselves “PoC” at all) and in others indigenous people ARE black.

As a black person who has seen antiblackness from plenty an Indigenous person, Native Americans are perfectly capable of being antiblack and belittling our experiences. Why are you talking about “our unique experience” as if it’s anywhere near the same? The way we experience racism is very different and honestly infrequently comparable. I am a first-generation immigrant and thus not at all native to this land like they are. Native Americans literally cooperated with white slave owners to capture runaway slaves. They very much benefit from antiblack oppression.

“BIPoC” is confusingly performative at best and promotes the false narrative that nonblack Natives and black people are somehow “almost the same.” (And no, I would not want “BPoC” as an alternative…) This is false and, quite frankly, I’m bothered by the fact that this article was written by a nonblack person.