Black is an overloaded term. It’s a race and an ethnicity. If you were to write about black people in Africa, it would be nonsensical to capitalize it because black doesn’t communicate any shared identity in that context. The right granularity is national, ethnic, or tribal.
But Black is a cultural identity in the context of the United States. Blacks, or African-Americans, are ethnically distinct and have shared history, culture, and language. In 1840, almost all blacks in America were slaves. In 1950, almost all blacks were descendants of slaves. At either time, almost all of them would have spoken English as their first language. At either time, most would have been born in the American South. Most importantly, at either time would have identified with each other on the basis of those shared traits.
Whites, on the other hand, are comprised of distinct ethnic groups and had their own communities throughout American history. Go to any major American city and you’ll find neighborhoods that are historically Italian, Irish, or German.
I disagree fundamentally with your take because I approach this subject academically instead of in pop culture terms. Both blacks and whites have distinct ethnic groups that are more granular. Just as whites are ethnically English, Irish, German, Scandinavian, Italian, etc., blacks are ethnically Akan, Cuban, Caribbean, Abyssian, Fulani, Zulu, Oromo, and more.
Let’s bring in an academic to this discussion.
Someone already linked the AP guidelines, but I’ll quote an actual professor with a background in this kind of stuff.
Here’s quote from an article written by John McWhorter, a prominent Black conservative who happens to be a professor of English and linguistics at Stanford the subject[1]:
“But what about the black business districts that thrived across the country after slavery was abolished? What about Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright and Thurgood Marshall, none born in Africa and all deeply American people? And while we're on Marshall, what about the civil rights revolution, a moral awakening that we gave to ourselves and the nation.”
“My roots trace back to working-class Black people - Americans, not foreigners - and I'm proud of it. I am John Hamilton McWhorter the Fifth. Four men with my name and appearance, doing their best in a segregated America, came before me. They and their dearest are the heritage that I can feel in my heart, and they knew the sidewalks of Philadelphia and Atlanta, not Sierra Leone.”
“So, we will have a name for ourselves - and it should be Black. "Colored" and "Negro" had their good points but carry a whiff of Plessy vs. Ferguson and Bull Connor about them, so we will let them lie. "Black" isn't perfect, but no term is.”
Are you better qualified to say whether Black should or shouldn’t be capitalized than a Black English and linguistics professor at Stanford? Is your take more academic than his? And if so on what basis? Because it doesn’t seem to be based context or history or what Black people call or have called themselves.
My claim and one his claims is simple: there is a culturally distinct group within America that is called African-American and Black and that the B should be capitalized. Whether The better is Black or African-American is up for debate but only within the African-American community. It’s our right to determine what the proper term is. In the meantime, the consensus is that you should capitalize the B in Black when referring to black Americans who descended from black slaves in America.
Feels like it would be very weird to ask someone if they are a recent immigrant (there are millions of African Americans who immigrated to the USA post 1965 or are children of those immigrants) or an ADOS to decide whether you should label them “Black” or “black”.
I’ll say whatever someone prefers though. Capitalizing “w” in white is a bit creepy to me though and has echoes of promoting the idea that all “whites” are the same.
2. Usually the discussion or writing would not be limited to ADOS. I’ve very rarely seen writers attempt to divide the community like that. As I said though, I’m fine with capitalizing it if that community wants it.
You could make a lot of the same statements about “whites” becoming one community in america. That said I don’t think capitalizing the W looks good, it’s weird and seems like something a white supremacist would do.
Your take isn't informed, as the reasoning behind the change, as explained by the editorial teams I linked above, and which has been debated academically, is an explicit counter to your primary argument.
So Blacks aren’t a “real people”? Is your actual argument that African-Americans don’t exist as a distinct ethnic group? If that’s your argument you should say so.
You are misrepresenting my position. My comment was to the effect that they are real people and that you are trying to reduce and dismiss their ethnicities.
Respectfully, I view these explanations as a retcon.
Race is a social construct and the reason these newspapers chose not to capitalize white was because it's historically been capitalized by white nationalists. It's also historically been capitalized by black nationalists. That's what ethno-fascists do. They reduce reality down to singular dimensions and obsess about them as they tell everyone to blame their problems on that reason.
Like they did in Germany they point to a group in that case the German Jews that is extremely culturally similar to another group that has less money per capita and then tell them that the explanation for these folks having more is they've taken it from you.
They spend decades creating an entire ideology and mythology around this notion.
Sound familiar?
I first noticed the capitalization of black when I was in college in the early 2000s and was enrolled in several black studies courses for my electives. A few extreme radicals there insisted on capitalizing black because they spent so much time around black nationalists.
I'm glad these journalistic institutions found a compelling explanation for doing what they were being told to do by activist groups. It's absurd and ridiculous and it looks like religion. What's next are they going to demand we all capitalize God too, like the oppressive evangelical churches of my childhood made me do? Those same churches also told me that I couldn't use the word lucky and I had to use the word blessed instead because that's what identitarians do:
They coerce your speech so they can coerce your thoughts.
I know this was a long rant but it's pretty awful to see this stuff get defended with anything looking like logic when it's absolutely not.
Black when capitalized doesn’t refer to a race.
It refers to an ethnicity. It’s not a retcon to capitalize ethnicities. We’ve been capitalizing ethnicities for a while now.
You can view them as a retcon, but your argument isn't engaging with their explanations seriously. It just dismisses them, invents a motivation and then ascribes malice to them.
I'm confused by this logic, because by this logic capitalizing "German Jews" is ethno-fascist, or "Asian". Am I missing something? Are Asian-Americans ethno-fascist?
It is precisely the same as black. The mental gymnastics on display here are astonishing.