8 ms·

Why is "black" being spelled with a capital "B"?

doubleunplussed 6y ago
This is now in the official style guides of several major media outlets. It emphasises blackness as an identity, i.e. it is a proper noun, the name of an ethnic group, and not just an adjective describing their skin colour. I can't say I agree that society should be fracturing into more identities instead of fewer, or that people should strongly identify with their race, but that's the trend and that's we're at with the terminology.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > This is now in the official style guides of several major media outlets. It's not particularly new; labels used as names of racial identity groups have been capitalized for a long time; “Black” as a proper noun or proper adjective in that context has been capitalized for a long time (used as a common adjective describing skin color it isn't, and the usages can be hard to differentiate otherwise.)
- TakuYam 6y ago
  Is blackness an identity though? I feels rather racist to diminish substantial cultural differences and experiences just because a group of people may have one common physical characteristic.
  - croissants 6y ago
    I'm far from an expert on this topic, but I believe the reasoning is that (at least in the USA), African-American ancestral links don't necessarily go back far enough to identify an ethnic group because of slavery. In the absence of the ability to say e.g. "I'm from the Yoruba people", the primary group identification just becomes Black. I agree that it seems kind of reductive from the outside, but I'm mostly inclined to let people decide their own names.
    - pseudalopex 6y ago
      Don't forget centuries of mixing and shared history.
themacguffinman 6y ago
It's an editorial style that some publications (including CNN) are adopting in service of racial sensitivity. CNN has mandated that all staff must capitalize both "Black" and "White" [1]: > Both words denote a racial or ethnic identity and therefore should be upper case when referring to a person, community, culture, etc., in the same way CNN capitalizes other descriptors of race, ethnicity and shared identity, including African American, Native American, Hispanic or Latino, Asian, Asian American, African, and other terms [1] https://www.thewrap.com/cnn-capitalize-black-white-race/ https://www.thewrap.com/cnn-capitalize-black-white-race/
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  At least CNN is being consistent. NY Times is capitalizing Black but not White, and they seem to be using tortured logic in my opinion to explain the discrepancy: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black...
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    The AP similarly used mental gymnastics to justify capitalizing black but not white: see https://apnews.com/article/7e36c00c5af0436abc09e051261fff1f https://apnews.com/article/7e36c00c5af0436abc09e051261fff1f and https://apnews.com/article/9105661462 https://apnews.com/article/9105661462 It’s remarkable that journalists can claim, as the AP does, that white peoples don’t have a shared culture when they also write articles ascribing a culture to white people and blaming it for all of society’s problems. The obvious inconsistency just seems like racism against white people.
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    I was surprised that so many NYT reader comments (including almost all of the 'NYT Picks' comments) disagree with the decision. I read the NYT comments somewhat regularly and cannot recall ever seeing such a high proportion of the highlighted comments criticizing the NYT's position. I give the NYT credit for highlighting these many critical comments, which appear to reflect the sentiment of the 'Reader Picks' comments as well.
oh_sigh 6y ago
It has been since earlier this year when a fairly small number of media employees decided to insert their activism into orthography. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black... Being black is mostly an empirical fact. But being Black is about your experience and culture. Calling a random black person "Black" is making the same mistake as calling a random black person "African American".
bisectable 6y ago
I'd like to call your attention to the following short Twitter (alas) thread. It may help shed some light onto your question: https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1339330010684002304 https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1339330010684002304 > In some contexts, the meaning of the words ('racist' and 'sexist') has shifted from “assigning lower value to a person because of their race or gender” to “infidel” and “heretic”. If you question virgin birth, you don’t correct important facts. You state that you are a heretic, and you’ll be ostracized. > Every religious movement asks its adherents for a public commitment to a sacred creed to show allegiance. The creed cannot be literally true, or random people would profess it. If you deny it, you will invoke ire of all adherents. If you go down defending it, you are a martyr. > This leads to some unpleasant effects on the margins, but many young people see a genuine need for a new, atheist religious movement, since both the theist religions and the rationalist liberalism of previous generations are failing to adress their social and existential issues.
gotoeleven 6y ago
I think we should further honor the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and make all the letters capitalized. BLACK
tolbish 6y ago
The same reason "Latino" is spelled with a capital "L".
- spicyramen 6y ago
  LatinX. As a native Spanish speaker I never understood the X and now I get it. Anyways is incorrect according to the Real Academy of the Spanish Language
  - tolbish 6y ago
    Why is the X capitalized?
  - bnjms 6y ago
    It’s ridiculous. It’s completely unnatural and can’t be worked into the language in a day to day way. They should have chosen another vowel like the short ‘e’, latiné.
    - notsureaboutpg 6y ago
      Any word can be worked into any language if the speakers care. The truth the inventors and promoters of "Latinx" don't want to face is that Latinos, African-Americans, and almost every other minority is far far more intolerant of everything LGBTQQIA2etc. than liberal elites are. Pew polls in 2019 showed that 49% of Black Americans did not believe gay people should be allowed to be married. And the more liberal elites try to change people's day-to-day lives in intrusive ways to force them to accept LGBTetc. (like with awkward forced language) the more and more such groups will repel from accepting that. I've seen it myself in my own community.
    - baryphonic 6y ago
      Truly astounding when the rallying cry to "end white supremacy" and "give representation to underprivileged/underrepresented groups" involves light-skinned Anglophone people dictating to darker-skinned Spanish-speaking people how the Spanish language should work, and in a way that betrays total ignorance of actually communicating in Spanish.
watisgoingon 6y ago
why is it even being mentioned? i miss hacker culture from the early internet, where it didnt matter your age, your sexuality, your "race"; we're all human beings :/ here's a conjecture: maybe racism is not real, maybe it's something that seems real but isn't, like "evil". it just seems so easy to find counterexamples to racist ideas. hate black people? surely i can introduce you to one who is pretty cool. hate whites? they aren't all bad. like seriously, how does it continue to exist? is it just an excuse? how can you look at a whole population and just hate em? is it something like an emotion? and if so, how do we solve it? it can't be corrected with education if it's a feeling. people can't help their feelings. drugs?
- herodoturtle 6y ago
  > here's a conjecture: maybe racism is not real, maybe it's something that seems real but isn't, like "evil". In South Africa they teach young schoolchildren about the country's apartheid history (and knowing this history is a good thing, because it provides context for the country's modern day inequality). Sadly there are some older generations who have oppposing (and often contradictory) views of exactly how and why said history played out the way it did. This disagreement of history often leads to modern day racism. Sadly it's here to stay - at least for a while still - but I do hope that one day it becomes a thing the past. EDIT: I see you removed your opening line. Leaving it here for context to my comment.
- bisectable 6y ago
  Yugoslavia is a cautionary tale. Humans (and possibly much older than humans) have an builtin in-group / out-group mechanism which, left unchecked, leads to widespread ethnic hatred. It doesn't take much to prime the bomb besides a steady dose of confirmation of the other group's evil ways, of which we have an ample supply thanks to the proliferation of sensationalistic (social) media. Our lives have become an incessant outrage stream. The clock is ticking... Hacker culture was born at the zenith of American liberalism, just after its ideals had triumphed over Soviet Union's self-destructing spiral. Those times may never come back, and liberalism itself is on life support :(
- webmaven 6y ago
  > it just seems so easy to find counterexamples to racist ideas. hate black people? surely i can introduce you to one who is pretty cool. hate whites? they aren't all bad. The problem here is the presentation of a counterexample in this way is casting it as an exception, and implicitly confirming the validity of the negative stereotype as the default assumption: This is also the underlying problem with certain compliments, eg. "Wow, you're a really good developer (unlike most women)!", "You're so well spoken (unlike most Black people)!", and so on. Given the human ability to rationalize, even a never-ending flood of in-your-face counterexamples is more likely to provoke reactions like "Well, women are just less talented developers on average, of course there are exceptions", and so on.

This is now in the official style guides of several major media outlets. It emphasises blackness as an identity, i.e. it is a proper noun, the name of an ethnic group, and not just an adjective describing their skin colour. I can't say I agree that society should be fracturing into more identities instead of fewer, or that people should strongly identify with their race, but that's the trend and that's we're at with the terminology.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> This is now in the official style guides of several major media outlets. It's not particularly new; labels used as names of racial identity groups have been capitalized for a long time; “Black” as a proper noun or proper adjective in that context has been capitalized for a long time (used as a common adjective describing skin color it isn't, and the usages can be hard to differentiate otherwise.)
TakuYam 6y ago
Is blackness an identity though? I feels rather racist to diminish substantial cultural differences and experiences just because a group of people may have one common physical characteristic.
- croissants 6y ago
  I'm far from an expert on this topic, but I believe the reasoning is that (at least in the USA), African-American ancestral links don't necessarily go back far enough to identify an ethnic group because of slavery. In the absence of the ability to say e.g. "I'm from the Yoruba people", the primary group identification just becomes Black. I agree that it seems kind of reductive from the outside, but I'm mostly inclined to let people decide their own names.
  - pseudalopex 6y ago
    Don't forget centuries of mixing and shared history.

themacguffinman 6y ago

It's an editorial style that some publications (including CNN) are adopting in service of racial sensitivity. CNN has mandated that all staff must capitalize both "Black" and "White" [1]: > Both words denote a racial or ethnic identity and therefore should be upper case when referring to a person, community, culture, etc., in the same way CNN capitalizes other descriptors of race, ethnicity and shared identity, including African American, Native American, Hispanic or Latino, Asian, Asian American, African, and other terms [1] https://www.thewrap.com/cnn-capitalize-black-white-race/ https://www.thewrap.com/cnn-capitalize-black-white-race/

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
At least CNN is being consistent. NY Times is capitalizing Black but not White, and they seem to be using tortured logic in my opinion to explain the discrepancy: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black...
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  The AP similarly used mental gymnastics to justify capitalizing black but not white: see https://apnews.com/article/7e36c00c5af0436abc09e051261fff1f https://apnews.com/article/7e36c00c5af0436abc09e051261fff1f and https://apnews.com/article/9105661462 https://apnews.com/article/9105661462 It’s remarkable that journalists can claim, as the AP does, that white peoples don’t have a shared culture when they also write articles ascribing a culture to white people and blaming it for all of society’s problems. The obvious inconsistency just seems like racism against white people.
- gnicholas 6y ago
  I was surprised that so many NYT reader comments (including almost all of the 'NYT Picks' comments) disagree with the decision. I read the NYT comments somewhat regularly and cannot recall ever seeing such a high proportion of the highlighted comments criticizing the NYT's position. I give the NYT credit for highlighting these many critical comments, which appear to reflect the sentiment of the 'Reader Picks' comments as well.

oh_sigh 6y ago

It has been since earlier this year when a fairly small number of media employees decided to insert their activism into orthography. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black... Being black is mostly an empirical fact. But being Black is about your experience and culture. Calling a random black person "Black" is making the same mistake as calling a random black person "African American".

bisectable 6y ago

I'd like to call your attention to the following short Twitter (alas) thread. It may help shed some light onto your question: https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1339330010684002304 https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1339330010684002304 > In some contexts, the meaning of the words ('racist' and 'sexist') has shifted from “assigning lower value to a person because of their race or gender” to “infidel” and “heretic”. If you question virgin birth, you don’t correct important facts. You state that you are a heretic, and you’ll be ostracized. > Every religious movement asks its adherents for a public commitment to a sacred creed to show allegiance. The creed cannot be literally true, or random people would profess it. If you deny it, you will invoke ire of all adherents. If you go down defending it, you are a martyr. > This leads to some unpleasant effects on the margins, but many young people see a genuine need for a new, atheist religious movement, since both the theist religions and the rationalist liberalism of previous generations are failing to adress their social and existential issues.

gotoeleven 6y ago

I think we should further honor the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and make all the letters capitalized. BLACK

tolbish 6y ago

The same reason "Latino" is spelled with a capital "L".

spicyramen 6y ago
LatinX. As a native Spanish speaker I never understood the X and now I get it. Anyways is incorrect according to the Real Academy of the Spanish Language
- tolbish 6y ago
  Why is the X capitalized?
- bnjms 6y ago
  It’s ridiculous. It’s completely unnatural and can’t be worked into the language in a day to day way. They should have chosen another vowel like the short ‘e’, latiné.
  - notsureaboutpg 6y ago
    Any word can be worked into any language if the speakers care. The truth the inventors and promoters of "Latinx" don't want to face is that Latinos, African-Americans, and almost every other minority is far far more intolerant of everything LGBTQQIA2etc. than liberal elites are. Pew polls in 2019 showed that 49% of Black Americans did not believe gay people should be allowed to be married. And the more liberal elites try to change people's day-to-day lives in intrusive ways to force them to accept LGBTetc. (like with awkward forced language) the more and more such groups will repel from accepting that. I've seen it myself in my own community.
  - baryphonic 6y ago
    Truly astounding when the rallying cry to "end white supremacy" and "give representation to underprivileged/underrepresented groups" involves light-skinned Anglophone people dictating to darker-skinned Spanish-speaking people how the Spanish language should work, and in a way that betrays total ignorance of actually communicating in Spanish.

watisgoingon 6y ago

why is it even being mentioned? i miss hacker culture from the early internet, where it didnt matter your age, your sexuality, your "race"; we're all human beings :/ here's a conjecture: maybe racism is not real, maybe it's something that seems real but isn't, like "evil". it just seems so easy to find counterexamples to racist ideas. hate black people? surely i can introduce you to one who is pretty cool. hate whites? they aren't all bad. like seriously, how does it continue to exist? is it just an excuse? how can you look at a whole population and just hate em? is it something like an emotion? and if so, how do we solve it? it can't be corrected with education if it's a feeling. people can't help their feelings. drugs?

herodoturtle 6y ago
> here's a conjecture: maybe racism is not real, maybe it's something that seems real but isn't, like "evil". In South Africa they teach young schoolchildren about the country's apartheid history (and knowing this history is a good thing, because it provides context for the country's modern day inequality). Sadly there are some older generations who have oppposing (and often contradictory) views of exactly how and why said history played out the way it did. This disagreement of history often leads to modern day racism. Sadly it's here to stay - at least for a while still - but I do hope that one day it becomes a thing the past. EDIT: I see you removed your opening line. Leaving it here for context to my comment.
bisectable 6y ago
Yugoslavia is a cautionary tale. Humans (and possibly much older than humans) have an builtin in-group / out-group mechanism which, left unchecked, leads to widespread ethnic hatred. It doesn't take much to prime the bomb besides a steady dose of confirmation of the other group's evil ways, of which we have an ample supply thanks to the proliferation of sensationalistic (social) media. Our lives have become an incessant outrage stream. The clock is ticking... Hacker culture was born at the zenith of American liberalism, just after its ideals had triumphed over Soviet Union's self-destructing spiral. Those times may never come back, and liberalism itself is on life support :(
webmaven 6y ago
> it just seems so easy to find counterexamples to racist ideas. hate black people? surely i can introduce you to one who is pretty cool. hate whites? they aren't all bad. The problem here is the presentation of a counterexample in this way is casting it as an exception, and implicitly confirming the validity of the negative stereotype as the default assumption: This is also the underlying problem with certain compliments, eg. "Wow, you're a really good developer (unlike most women)!", "You're so well spoken (unlike most Black people)!", and so on. Given the human ability to rationalize, even a never-ending flood of in-your-face counterexamples is more likely to provoke reactions like "Well, women are just less talented developers on average, of course there are exceptions", and so on.