I don’t really care either way, but why Black not White?
I can’t imagine what harm it does. I’m not saying it doesn’t, I just can’t come up with anything off the top of my head that isn’t easily dismissed as looking for excuses to not have to hit your shift button once in a while.
Personally, I’m of the mind that if Black people want me to capitalize it. It’s takes an absolute minimum amount of effort on my part and shows some respect. And, honestly, it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference to me either way.
To tell someone that’s requesting you do something, that requires almost zero effort, that you’re not going to do it because it’s stupid seems deliberately disrespectful.
If feels like when I ask a co-worker to do something using this method instead of that method because it’ll make my life a ton easier and require no extra (or even less) effort on their part and they refuse, just because.
I think the hangup there is that people considering black to be an adjective while Native American is a proper noun.
As I typed that, I’m wondering if capitalizing Black is related to the shift I’ve seen over the last decade or so where non-white/dark skinned people are collectively referring to themselves as brown.
I haven’t thought this through or heard all the arguments, but it seems to me that capitalizing Black but not white reinforces the idea that white is the default—that Black people are a specific subgroup of people but white people are not; they’re just normal people. And I don’t think that’s an attitude we ought to be reinforcing.
Asking for people to type White instead of white is going to very quickly become the online/print version of All Lives Matter. No white person ever asked to be called White (online) until Black people did and then it’s ‘what about us?’.
I hadn’t thought of that. I’m not sure I agree with it, but it’s not something I gave any thought to.
I think, my gut reaction is that we’ve shifted from white and black to white and brown with Black being a subgroup of brown. Maybe?
I’m just saying it’s consistent grammatically. If it’s grammatically correct to write Black to refer to people of African descent in order to differentiate from the color, then it makes sense to do the same for white people. Plus, Thudlow Boink makes a good point about white remaining the default, which is no good for anyone.
That, I totally understand and it was my first thought as well. I think it’s just going to take some getting used to. I think you have to make a shift in your brain from thinking of black as an adjective to Black as a proper noun.
However, arguing against a small change because it feels grammatically incorrect, to me, feels like looking for an excuse not to do it.
OK, to be perfectly clear, I’ll cheerfully use a capital B, even though I disagree with the change for grammatical reasons. However, if racial descriptors are going to be capitalized, then white should also be capitalized, but I’ll cheerfully keep using a small w if that’s what it’s supposed to be.
I’m not trying to say all colors matter or anything like that.
Generally, brown isn’t used by the people most people consider Black. It’s more a Latinx+South Asian + Middle Eastern thing (And here, in South Africa, it’s specifically a Coloured thing)
I’m not saying you are, I just think that’s the direction it’s going to take.
Racial descriptors as adjectives or nouns? I’ve always been under the impression that the usage of white and black would have stemmed from physical skin color. As Black people, along with a large chunk of the rest of the non-white world seem to be migrating towards brown, ISTM, that Black is now a group name instead of referring to skin color.
White may also turn into a capitalized noun for any number of reason, but suggesting it should be, right now, as Black people are making a shift from black to Black seems like bad timing.
But it’s not grammatically incorrect at all. Using an example from above, Native American is capitalized because it is not just an adjective, it is an ethnicity or culture. If I use “native” to refer to me, it’s just a descriptor.
It would be grammatically incorrect to use upper-case Black if it was being used as an adjective, but the recent shift is to say that “black” is not just a descriptor, it is an ethnicity/culture and is therefore properly capitalized. “White” is not used in the same way (except by white supremacists), it’s just a descriptor.
You might disagree with the use of “black” as more than an adjective, but disagreeing because of grammar is silly.
As a noun? Like, “I have a friend who is a Black”? I think that’s pretty out of favor. Maybe “In terms of getting hassled by police, Blacks are hassled more than whites”?
I really mean as an adjective, I guess. Wouldn’t Brown also be capitalized?
Replying to TroutMan, I don’t really see the distinction there.
You’re right, I should probably clarify that the majority of the time I hear it, it’s coming from a non-white, non-Black person. However, I’ve certainly heard Black people say things like “they didn’t see me as a human, they just saw a scary brown person” when talking about police brutality.
I think they may mean literally, there.
Well, then maybe don’t say I have a friend who is Black. That seems like an odd example to choose. But someone saying “I’m part of the Black community” isn’t any different than “I’m part of the African American Community”. Again, you have to stop thinking of black as a color, in this context it’s the name of a culture/group.
That’s the point I’m making. As an adjective, using it to describe the color of someone’s skin, it would not, and historically has not, been capitalized, neither would brown. As a proper noun, using it as a name, it would be.
Is “Native” ?
Never come to South Africa.
In my first example, I wrote “I have a friend who is A Black”, trying to use it as a noun. And, why “Black community”, but “African American Community”?
I didn’t follow what you meant about “B/brown” – does it remain uncapitalized because it’s not really a culture or group descriptor?
In general, are you saying to capitalize Black when it’s a noun, but not an adjective? Because I don’t think that’s right either.
As someone mentioned, everyone born here in the US is a “native American”, but not a “Native American”.
At the moment, so far as I understand it, people referring to themselves as brown, are referring, specifically, to the color of their skin. They’re using brown as an adjective to describe a physical trait. Just like how you’d say that you have brown hair, not Brown hair.
Exactly.