I detest this acronym, and I wish people would stop using
it. It stands for “black, Asian and
minority ethnic” and is a tautology, ungrammatical and arguably disrespectful.
Firstly, it is obviously a tautology since black people ARE
an ethnic minority, as are Asian people – at least in most parts of the
UK. So the term “ethnic minority”
already includes them, and you don’t need to repeat it. Indeed the conjunction “and”
implies that black and Asian people are NOT ethnic minorities. If it was “other” ethnic minorities I suppose it
would be alright, except that it would be picking out two particular groups in
preference to others – say, Irish, or Roma, or Jewish or Turkish Cypriot.
Secondly, the normal rule in the English language (as
distinct from some Romance languages) is that the adjective precedes the noun.
We say “white teeth” and “black skin” rather than “teeth white” and “skin black”. The word “minority” is a noun and the word “ethnic”
is an adjective – so why is it “minority ethnic” rather than “ethnic minority”?
The third issue is this.
It used to be acceptable to define groups of people by some shared
characteristic, such as age, or poverty or skin colour. Thus, we could say “the elderly”, “the poor”
or just “blacks”, in which case the adjective is used as a collective noun. However, rightly or wrongly this came to be
deemed disrespectful, and one had to say “elderly people”, “poor people” or “black
people”. As an elderly man myself, I don’t
personally feel that it is disrespectful to refer to elderly people as “the
elderly”, but I can understand the resistance to the use of “blacks” because of
its association with racial discrimination in apartheid South Africa or the
American Deep South.
So where did this unfortunate acronym come from? I have googled
the term, but although there is a lot of comment and discussion about it, I
have not been able to find a specific origin.
According to a BBC report¹, it seems that its invention and adoption may have been a reaction in the
1990s against the use of “black” to encompass all non-white people, as this was
disliked by some Asian communities.
Some commentators, especially on the political Right, have
also argued that we don’t need such a term at all as it lumps together heterogeneous
groups who have little else in common and overlooks the differences between
them. Others do see a need to describe
collectively people who are not “white British”, but there is little agreement
on what should replace BAME.
I just wish people would stop using it and say “ethnic
minority”.
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