Just as long as you don’t mind getting in line behind me.
[QUOTE=Hippy Hollow]
I get you, Li’l Pluck. I’ve actually know a few Black Jews (as well as Latino) which is why I said if a White Jewish person would rather focus on his Jewish heritage than being White, I’ll accommodate - though I think this tacitly says “White” in his mind. (Knowing the guy I’m thinking about, I think he’d think Jewish=White.)<snip>
[QUOTE]
I gotcha, man. Oh, and everything else you’ve said in this thread.
I’ve never caught any flack from my black friends for using that term, nor can I see why they would. It’s a fairly accurate, and in many cases obvious descriptor. It would be like me taking offense at being referred to as “that tall guy over there”. (I’m not NBA material, but buying clothes is still a bitch)
Unfortunately, there seems to be no equivalently safe term for Hispanic/Spanish/Chicano/Mexican-American/Latino/Latin-American.
And mine isn’t white! It’s inaccurate, but hardly worth the umbrage.
In my opinion, black and white are not ethnic or cultural descriptors, and thus should not be capitalized. To me, African-American is the cultural descriptor which identifies a subset of blacks that were born in America and descendants of slaves. People who have recently emigrated from Nigeria, for example, I would not describe as African-American. Neither would I someone from Jamaica. However, as a physical descriptor, black would work. As an ethnic or cultural group, Black does not work as they are all very different cultures.
No it wouldn’t. Blacks are not called black because they have black skin. They are called black because they belong to the “Black race”. Hippy is correct in capitalizing the term on that basis. I don’t do it because the habit of keeping black and white lowercased is so well-engrained.
Most black folk in America are decidedly brown. A good many are even paler than brown. There’s nothing accurate, in a descriptive way, about calling all of them black.
Interesting. I can’t say as how I “get it” at some deep level, and yes I’m (half-Jewish) white. But I think I understand better.
(btw: if I ever encountered an Italian-American going to great lengths to tout the accomplishments of Italy, I’d think that was pretty darn silly, particularly in this day and age where Italians and Greeks and Poles are basically 100% white, if not quite WASPs.)
You forgot to add the parenthetical note, “may he roast in hell.” 
OneCentStamp, who grew up in the 'burbs of DC and knows what it’s like to miss your turn and have to drive halfway to Richmond before you can turn around. :mad:
True, blacks aren’t called black because they have black skin, any more than whites are called white because they have white skin. In this context, the terms refer to dark and light skin*, and no one construes them to literally mean (jet) black and (snow) white. So while as a physical descriptor “black” may not be “accurate” to you, it not only would work, as pulykamell stated, it does work. People know what it means.
*Yes, “black” in the U.S. incorporates more than just skin tone (e.g., [Asian] Indians aren’t generally considered black), but the point is it’s neither intended nor understood to mean absolutely black in color.
…That’s like saying ‘that tall guy over there’ should be written ‘that Tall guy over there’ because, well, the Empire State Building is tall and that guy is obviously shorter than the Empire State Building. If you get a chess set and the pieces are Navy and Light Pink, are you going to stop calling them black and white as well? “Indigo Mottled Gloss e2e4”… 
Just because “people know what it means” doesn’t mean that black is a physical descriptor. Everyone knows what I mean when I say that a person is Latino, but that doesn’t tell you anything about what that person looks like. Right? If I say that Vanessa Williams is a black woman, all that means is that at minimum she descends from sub-Saharan Africans. It doesn’t tell you anything meaningful about her appearance.
Then it’s not being used as a physical descriptor. The darkness of one’s skin is incidental to being black. Will Smith is not a black man because his skin is dark. He’s black because of his racial identity. Which is why it makes more sense to capitalize the term than not.
When you say “the tall guy over there”, the guy’s height affects the suitability of calling him tall. It makes no sense to call someone tall when they are in fact not tall at all. This is why “tall” is a physical descriptor.
“Black” does not work the same way. If I tell you that I’m a black woman, all that tells you is that my ancestors originated from Africa. But I’ve told you nothing about the color of my skin (yellow beige), the color of my hair (brown with blonde streaks), or any other physical features.
If I point a stranger out to you by saying “the black chick over there”, all I’m really is saying is that the stranger looks like someone whose ancestors originated from Africa. Which means that this person has the features we typically associate with the “Black race”, and I’m just making assumption that that they are Black. This is no different than saying “the Indian chick over there” or “the Latino fella over there”. Notice how we capitalize these adjectives. They are not physical descriptors and neither is “black” as it is most commonly used.
As long as we’re picking nits, Arnie is Austrian American.
Old joke from a comic: I’m the product of a mixed race marriage. My dad was African American and my mom was Black.
Only if you are in the habit of capitalizing “white”–a practice that has not been common in the U.S. in at least well over 100 years (if it ever was).
I leave both terms in lowercase because that was how I grew up and that is how both terms are generally presented in publications, today.
I do not have any deep attachment to any given usage, but if you attempt to get into a linguistic argument based on pure logic, you are pretty well doomed. Language usage has never been a purely logical exercise and (outside computers) it never will be.
:smack:
I knew something wasn’t quite right about that… thanks.
BTW, the joke - that describes me, essentially. And this is one of those jokes that’s actually true. There are a whole lot of cultural things the Jamaican side of my family does that the African American side doesn’t. For instance, I was raised Catholic. Not one of my African American relatives is Catholic. (And yes, I do know that there are many African American Catholics, but I’d estimate most Black folks in this country are some form of Protestant.)
I don’t know of a specific Tall culture, so I wouldn’t capitalize it. (I’m 6’0"; I guess I don’t quite make the grade, eh?) But, for instance, there is a Deaf culture, and people who are a part of it capitalize.
you with the face, thanks for the backup. I recall we had a thread asking if there was such a thing as “White culture” a while back - here it is. I believe there is, and it is the dominant culture established by European American immigrants to the US. So, I will continue to capitalize, as the APA stylebook states (which is the stylebook predominant in my profession):
I’d avoid the North End in Boston if I were you. Did you know that Italian immigrants founded Bank of America? I didn’t, until I moved to Boston and an Italian American told me.
No, it tells me about your skin tone and your natural hair color about as much information as somebody telling me they are in fact, a blonde, and it tells me nothing else. Not all people who are of african descent are black, and not all people who self-identify as black are of african descent. You could be Latino and black and also Jewish, or you could be Latino and white.
Most people I’ve met have no problem classifying people into blonde, brunette, and redhead bucket. People also disagree and often self-identify differently than most people would put them. I’ve met a lot of blondes and redheads who I would classify as brunettes, yet they are blondes and redheads based on what they say they are. And while there’s white and black hair, there is no red hair, only reddish. I’ll capitalize White and Black as descriptors when you capitalize Redhead. After all, the likelihood of a natural redhead having ancestors in Ireland is about the same as the likelihood of a person who identifies as black having ancestors in Africa. :dubious:
Here in Boston, the North End is a pretty interesting example of a European ethnic enclave. There are a lot of similarities to other communities of color. Many people who live there are the children or grandchildren of immigrants, who experienced discrimination and moved to the community that allowed them to retain the aspects of their ethnic identity. Virtually everyone there speaks English, but there are old - and not-so-old - men playing bocchi ball speaking Italian every night in the park. I had a friend who lived in an apartment in Little Italy - her landlady had lived in the same building all her life, was born here, but spoke with a heavy Italian accent. And when Italy won the World Cup, people went nuts in the streets. American-born people of Italian descent were wearing jerseys yelling, “It’s great to be Italian!”
It didn’t strike me as silly at all; just cool that they felt a connection to the land where their forefathers/mothers came from. I don’t think they’re confused or don’t want to be Americans.
I’ve never been to Minnesota, but a friend tells me there are pretty strong Norwegian ethnic enclaves there too. I had a science teacher in middle school that everyone thought was from Germany - his name was Kessler and he had a heavy German accent - turns out he was from a small town in North Dakota.
Someone who is blonde, by definition, has hair of a certain hue. There may be no universal consensus on where that hue starts and ends, but everyone agrees that “a blonde” is defined by the color of their hair.
“A black” is not defined by their appearance. I don’t really see how you can disagree with this. Michael Jackson, for example, is a black man, even though he’s whiter than a caucasian albino, has invisible lips and a nose like Peter Pan. Not matter what he does to himself, he’ll still be black. A black person is not black because they look a certain way. A black person is black because of their heritage.
None of this alters the fact that a “black person” is determined by who they are (or who they say they are), not what they look like.
You are conflating the subjectivity associated with hair color identification with self-identifying as a race. There’s certainly wiggle room in identifying with a specific race. But hair color is a physical property. Race is not.
But you can look at an individual and pinpoint their race, based on the entire suite of their physical features. If I tell you, “Go see the black man over there”, you know to look for an individual possessing certain features–a certain hair texture, skin coloring, etc. While there are black people who you can’t do this with reliably (you might have to rely on less ambiguous features such as height, gender, girth, etc.), it would be wrong to say that “black” can’t be used as a physical descriptor. We speak of people who “look black” too often for this not to be true.
The reverse is not true, you’re right. Telling someone that I’m black does not tell them anything about how I look, because one can have straight hair, blue eyes, and white skin and still be black. In this way, black is definitely not a physical descriptor. Which only means the word can be used both as a physical descriptor AND a cultural/heritage descriptor. It doesn’t have to be either/or.
It does not make sense to look at a stranger and call them African American unless you have specific cues (language, dress, mannerisms, etc.) that would suggest this. But you can validly say that someone is “black” based on strictly on physical appearance, which makes it a safer word to use. I think this is what pulykamell was saying, and I agree 100% with it.
I don’t disagree either, but I still think that’s no different than describing a stranger as “the Asian guy over there” or “the Arab guy over there”. We capitalize these terms even though they are being used as shorthand for "the guy with the beige skin, almond-shaped eyes, and straight black hair commonly associated with membership in the Asian racial category ". It’s because at the root of it, “Asian” and “Arab” denote race and ethnicity. When we call a guy on street these things, its only because we are assuming that’s what they are based on their appearance.
In my view, we treat “black” the same way we treat these other terms. Yet those are capitalized and “black” (and “white”) is not. Even though I don’t cap the word, I understand the reasoning behind doing so.