So Yahoo News had this headline today: “Woman, black seek to become firsts in SC runoff”. What?
For years now I’ve been told that using “black” and depending on context other group names like that as a noun without “person” attached is not good. (At least in the US - I think usage is different elsewhere.) “He’s black” is okay, “He’s a black” is not. Right? Or am I totally nuts?
is it not an adjective?
I think the headline works with any adjective that would reasonable describe the woman.
Given that the headline is using the plural forms, I would guess that the more grammatical, non-headliney sentence would read “A woman and a black man seek to become firsts in SC runoff.”
I think it is suspect. I also think it’s probably a (mostly) innocent victim of the need to cut out extraneous words to save headline space. Someone decided “man” was extraneous.
I think it’s headline usage, where you can leave words out if they don’t really add to the meaning.
Vile journalism. Expedience tops form apparently. Not so atypical, though.
And not quite as bad as a “for sale” ad I once saw which read “White girl’s bedroom set for sale.”
No, it’s a noun there. “A woman”, “a black”.
Note the word “firsts” - with an S, plural. Two people are being referred to. One is a woman, the other is black. The woman is not black, and the black person is not a woman, otherwise it would have been phrased differently. She would be the first woman in this position, he would be the first black person.
In speech or body-of-text writing, using “black” as a noun like that is probably frowned upon and avoided. Headlines, however, have their own set of norms, and perhaps the main one is to use no more words than ABSOLUTELY necessary, and sometimes even fewer than that.
You know what it meant, thus no more words are ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. End of discussion, next question please. 
“A black” just in general sounds really weird to me. I can’t speak to any particular racism aspect, but aesthetically, it just sounds and looks wrong.
Yeah, but you wouldn’t say “Jap” to save letters, ever.
But how are we supposed to know from reading it that it’s a black man and not another woman who is black? Is man really superfluous? It could be a white woman and a black woman that are running.
I think the reason it sounds so weird (to me) is that they’re both being trotted out as sort of “weird” categories. Like, what’s the race of the first woman? Probably white because they don’t mention it. What’s the gender of the black? Probably white. Like white male is the default which sort of gives me a creepy vibe.
Well, I don’t think she counts as “white” in the US: her parents are Punjabi Sikhs, so there’s a another political first that going unmentioned in the headline.
The story is about two people who for identity reasons may be notable in a SC politcal race. One person is notable for being female, the other for being African-American. The headline writer has to get the gist of the story into a fairly small number of characters without using slurs. There are many, many non-racist cases where “black” is used as a noun. Search “blacks in America” on Google and you will see how common this is.
The plural is different than the singular, IMHO.
ETA - and I’m surprised that they didn’t mention Haley’s race, considering that one of our fine state politicians just made national news calling her a “raghead”.
When putting that headline in the Google search lots of new outlets picked up the AP story and headline and ran it “as is”, however a couple of news outlets changed the headline to" “Woman, black man seek to become firsts in SC runoff”.
Actually it bothers me more that headline writers don’t capitalize first letters anymore. But it doesn’t bother me in the context of a headline anymore than it would as a text message.
Yeah, “black” on its own sounds weird and stilted (and, of course, a bit outdated) to me. “Black man” is a much clearer headline. It took me a couple of reads to understand the original headline as written.
“Black” as a noun always bothers me, until I think about “white” as a noun and realize that doesn’t bother me at all.
I think it’s because of a scene title in Birth of a Nation, “Disarming the Blacks”, where a couple of Klansmen scare dozens of black rebels into dropping their guns and running away, presumably by dint of their inherent superiority.
South Asians are typically pigeonholed under Caucasian for documentary purposes, although most people don’t think of us that way.
Really? I thought South Asians counted as Asians. (Although I wouldn’t usually say, for instance, “my friend Tannistha is Asian”, I’d say “my friend Tannistha is Indian”; I am aware that this usage is not universal.)
Anyway, the example in the OP sounds weird to me. I don’t know that it’s inherently racist, but it looks wrong.
Well, she doesn’t look like an Injun. I’m sure that’s why. (Trust me, to some here she’s plenty foreign. There was evidently a vicious slanderous attack claiming, falsely, that she was a Buddhist! Hide the kids!)
That was probably someone who had never heard of Sikhism as a religion. (And who, if they watched Bend It Like Beckham, missed all the religious references.