Should We Stop Saying "Poly"?

[joreth]

I've been seeing the "polya" abbreviation being used for a while now, and at first I thought it was just someone who didn't speak English very well. Then I started hearing rumblings in the community that some people wanted us to all stop using the abbreviation "poly" to refer to polyamory because Polynesian people also use the abbreviation "poly"

Comments

[ext_2238475]

I hadn't heard of this at all, so this is interesting to me. Lots to unpack. Thanks for posting about it so thoughtfully as you always do! :)

[joreth]

Yeah, it's still a fairly new thing. Like I said, I hadn't heard anything about it at all from the Polynesian community. It really only came on my radar because one poly FB group moderator keeps saying "polya" instead of "poly" and even then I ignored it until a bunch of other people in another group started complaining about being banned for refusing to say "polya" or for *asking* what it was about

[anais_pf]

In a quick look around the internet at information about Polynesian people, I found (as I suspected I would) comments such as "I hate being called Polynesian because it is a term given to us by white man." My impression is that Polynesian people do not refer to themselves as Polynesian, but by some other term (of which there are many). I'm not clear on how prevalent the term is among Polynesian people, in referring to themselves. My Hawaiian housemate certainly doesn't call himself Polynesian, ever

[joreth]

Exactly - the term itself has been embraced by the polyamorous community but is ambiguous within the Polynesian communities (and since I don't know another word to call them, I'll just keep using that until I learn of another, more appropriate word). That's why I suggested that the shorthand has more cultural weight among polyamorous folk and it is unreasonable to request that we give it up.

If, like the Native Americans and like Latinos, the Polynesian folk decide to reject the word because of its colonizational roots, I'll be happy to call them something else of their choosing. But I don't think it's for them to decide that *we* can't also choose our own name just because it happens to be similar to their given name.

The group of which you speak.

[brujaoscura]

Yeah- I ran into that same thing. I have some friend from Polynesia(These folks refer to themselves as Tongan or Maori)and I asked them about it. They LAUGHED their butts off when I told them about the controversy in that group. So when they tackled ME for using "poly" I told them plainly and added dictionary entries to back me up.
And got accused of white privelege and "dictionary fallacy". (My parting shot to the mod who followed me off the board to ask me why I posted what I posted about the BS white privelege was that I was a "stupid white chick" who had the intelligence to use reference materials correctly.

Re: The group of which you speak

[joreth]

It seems to me that presuming to speak for a minority group and taking it upon oneself to decide how to "demarginalize" that group shows far more white privilege than using the term does.

White people are notorious for the White Saviour Complex and swooping down from our position of privilege to save the brown people is as much a symptom of colonialism as appropriation is.

I'd like to see an actual person from a Polynesian country tell them to knock it off. How much you wanna bet they'd whitesplain racism and colonialism to them?

Permission to use?

[anonymous]

Joreth,

I'd like to save this and, if the "polya" discussion takes hold enough to become more of a thing, reprint pieces of it in any Polyamory in the News coverage of the issue that I do. Can I have your OK for this?

Also, a minor fix:

> happen to have the same Latin prefix

Actually Greek. (Latin would be multi- ).

Alan M.

[joreth]

Yep, you can use it. And thanks for the correction. I always mix up Greek and Latin, and since I wrote this off the cuff, I had a 50/50 chance :-)

[margareta87]

Alan, if you decide to cover it, would you give me a heads-up before you do the post? I'd like to do a "best practices/style guide"-type post, but only if this gets any bigger. I'm not sure I want to amplify the issue until we get more information on whether this is really A Big Deal.

[margareta87]

This is Eve, BTW.

[margareta87]

This is totally new to me, too, and I'm struggling with it on a number of levels

[joreth]

Yep, I'm with you, I think this is being spun as cultural appropriation when it isn't and also a classic mixup of "I feel hurt" = "someone is hurting me". Very often, we can feel hurt when no one is, in fact, hurting us.

I'm fine with pausing by default when an oppressed people says "stop, this hurts us", but then I think we need to actually examine the situation to see if we are really hurting someone or if this is an individual who is not clear on the tools of oppression and simply sees oppression as existing by default because they are oppressed (if that makes sense?).

After actually considering this particular case and not just reacting, I agree with you that this is not a case of either cultural appropriation or of oppression, just of two independent cultures running in to each other and in order to make the case to stop using the word, we have to choose a winner in the Oppression Olympics when it'd be better to just clarify when there is confusion.

[margareta87]

FWIW, it appears the hashtag #polya is already in use for...something that I don't get but that seems to have to do with math:

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23polya&src=typd

[leora]

I'm not really here. I stopped using LJ when they stopped being trustworthy. But I needed to send you a quick message. I deleted a piece of spam from polyamorous, but I figured I should toss maintainer power at somebody still on this site. So, you now have it too. If you don't want it, you can toss some power at somebody else who is active. I hope you don't mind. I just don't want to need to login to this site any more.

[joreth]

I'm sorry, I don't understand what all that means.

[leora]

Basically it means in the community "polyamorous" you can now click edit on posts to get the option to delete them, which is mainly useful for spam. Or you can pick somebody else in the community and give them power. You can also totally ignore it.