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

[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.

But from the beginning, the cultural argument against "poly" has rubbed me the wrong way because it seems to be assuming that "polyamory" *isn't* its own marginalized culture, just because there are so many white people in it. While I definitely agree that we need to be cognizant of internalized white privilege, I think we also need to be careful not to assume that being white means we have *no* intersecting oppression.

In most oppression discussions, this usually means that we have to explain to white people that just because they're also poor, it doesn't mean that they know what it's like to experience oppression as a black trans woman, for example, but that they could use their experience as being poor to develop empathy for people who have it even worse.

But I think this is more like a handful of black people speaking on behalf of all black people (christian, men, and wealthy as well as women, trans, etc.) telling homeless people that their experience of being homeless and their homeless identity is infringing on the black people's ability to combat racism and feel safe as black people just because so many of those homeless people are also white and ignoring that they may be disabled or gay or trans as well.