I’m a Black woman, but I still won’t say ‘Bame’

Why do some politicians and business leaders insist on using a term that lumps together Black, Asian and minority ethnic, asks Ava Vidal. You may as well change it to YL – You Lot

Bame is a problematic acronym, not least because it’s shorthand for ‘anything but white’ (PA)

I thought we’d said bye-bye to Bame. The acronym – a neat catch-all for “Black, Asian and minority ethnic”, and bound up in quite old-fashioned notions of political blackness – gained traction in Britain in the 1970s when it was taken up by well-intentioned anti-racist movements.

After really getting going in the 2010s, when policymakers and people working in officialdom couldn’t say it often enough, “Bame” promptly dropped dead – not uncoincidentally around the same time the racial justice movement took off after the 2021 murder of George Floyd. Bame expired under the weight of its own contradictions.

And, well… good. I, for one, am not Bame. I’m Black.