I thought it was a catch-all for everyone but non-Hispanic whites. So, it could include culturally Hispanic people, even with very light skin, and even East Asians. Basically, anyone who doesn’t benefit from being part of the dominant culture.
There’s a mixed attitude towards Brown identity, and certainly some of the scholars on the topic are capitalizing Brown while others don’t. Just look at the references in the Wikipedia article. So I wouldn’t say it’s just about skin colour. Or why would it not include Blacks? There are plenty of Brown people darker than plenty of Black people, after all.
I think it’d cause resentment, maybe only among a small number of people, but that’s still resentment that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. You’d start seeing people make a point of capitalising white but not black, and then people would get mad about that, and so on. I’m already seeing it on my Twitter feed.
Meanwhile, capitalising black and not white doesn’t actually solve or reduce any racial problems. It’s just empty tokenism, a substitute for doing something real that conveniently doesn’t cost anything.
ISTM these two are the nub of the debate.
Which ought to prevail & why? I was sure until I really thought about it some more.
I do think that right now while the single most important problem facing the USA is ensuring Trump doesn’t win in Nov, any “culture war” issue that can be deferred until after he’s gone is the strategically smarter move.
As the other threads about the unrest are putting it, we can convert another 10-15% of fence sitters / apathetics from “Trump is the biggest threat” to “Unrest is the biggest threat, so vote for unrest repression.” And that would hand the election to Trump even before he starts cheating.
I say we go all in and capitalize EVERYBODY. Black, White, Brown, Of Color, Gay, Lesbian, Protestant, Atheist, Old, Young, Cranky, Drunk … 
As I’ve said before, I really don’t care, and would just as soon call people whatever they prefer. I just don’t care enough to have to keep track.
Big B Black - got it. Strikes me as stupid, but takes no effort on my part and I’d have to go through thousands of topics before I ran out of things I cared more about.
Ya know, you’d think I would have found the wiki article at the beginning of this thread when I was looking for it. It would have been helpful and somewhat changed (not in a hugely meaningful way) what I was saying.
Why? Why would it cause resentment? Is there any argument you can make for why someone could or should resent capitalizing the b in Black that isn’t racist?
“Why are you capitalising black but not white!? That’s reverse racism!”
“Next up on Tucker Carlson, is the left using PC Punctuation to brainwash your kids?”
Et cetera…
Again, I’m not saying very many people would think this way, or that it’s reasonable for them to do so. But some people will get quite impressively mad about this. Then, inevitably, other people will get mad at them for getting mad, and so on forever and ever. There’s a certain kind of person for whom this sort of nonsense is Very Serious Business and they just will not let it go.
Ordinarily, the fact that some incurably argumentative dorks on Twitter might get mad about something is no reason not to do it. But in this case the ‘something’ is just a silly, tokenistic gesture which the papers wouldn’t be doing if it cost them a single penny. It’s so meaningless that it’s just not worth any amount of aggravation.
Often when doing formal writing for an organization you are instructed to follow a particular style guide. There are several different style guides out there.
Follow the style guide. If somebody is unhappy about why you capitalized or didn’t capitalize a word, all you have to say is, “Go talk to the people that wrote the style guide.”
However, this blame-shifting technique does not work very well in informal writing.
Tucker Carlson is only talking to people that like Tucker Carlson. The rest of the world doesn’t take him seriously, along with the rest of Fox News. Besides, it makes literally no difference what anyone on the left does, even if it’s something the right has done in the past, if the left is doing it now, it’s wrong and evil and it’s only being done to take away your liberties.
Let them. Should the BLM matter stop what they’re doing because white people are getting upset? We’re talking about nothing more than hitting your shift button once in a while…or don’t, I doubt they’re really going to care if random people on the internet don’t capitalize the B or do capitalize the W.
And what kind of person is that?
Meaningless to who? Meaningless to you? It doesn’t appear that way or you wouldn’t be pushing back against it.
It’s clearly not meaningless to the people that are trying to make it happen.
And, keep in mind, these ‘certain kind of people’ that won’t let this go, those are exactly the minds that need to be changed.
Yeah, but that’s quite a lot of people. His show is very popular.
Oversensitive, disagreeable people with no sense of perspective and a persecution complex.
Of course not. BLM are fighting for meaningful changes. The reason I don’t like all this capitalisation nonsense is because it doesn’t actually do anything. If it did, I’d be fine with it.
That brings me on to another point. Some people will care very, very much. Not because capitalising black actually does anything, but because ‘calling people out’ for not doing it makes them feel virtuous. If capitalising black and not white is normalised then you’ll inevitably get annoying wokescolds chiding people for getting it wrong. That’ll cause even more bad feeling. I’ve seen this already in my Twitter feed. One person says “You need to capitalise the B in Black”, the other says “No, but I can capitalise the F in ‘Fuck off’” and all of a sudden you’ve got a flame war. And all over a gesture that’s completely pointless and doesn’t have any benefit to counterbalance the animosity.
The power of social media to amplify this bullshit can’t be underestimated. In fact, I’m going to make a prediction: if capitalising black but not white is normalised, pretty soon you’ll have people saying that capitalising white is an alt-right dog whistle. It’d be just like what happened with the OK sign. I wouldn’t be surprised if people started getting fired for it.
The issue of capitalisation, in and of itself, is meaningless to me. What isn’t meaningless to me is the inevitable resentment and bad feeling that it’ll give rise to. The last thing we need is more culture war bullshit, particularly over empty tokenistic gestures.
On that point, who exactly are these people? I’ve never met anyone who’s actually argued for this. Everyone I know, in real life and online, is either mad about it or couldn’t care less.
You’re more optimistic about that than I am. In my experience, the Venn overlap between ‘People who get mad about trivial shit’ and ‘People who are stubborn to a fault’ is pretty much 100%.
As Ynnad said, if there’s a style guide, follow it. Most freelancers writers learn early that you’ll write differently for publication or medium you write for. But that’s not really the issue here. There’s no style guide for casual writing or social media.
I always fall back on calling people what they want to be called. If your name is Janet and you want to be called Seraph, I’ll call you Seraph. But it’s difficult to keep up in an ever-changing landscape where the players can’t all agree.
This is one of the reasons for the resurgence of “indigenous” (also often capitalized). It lacks the ambiguity of “native.” If I need to use one of those adjectives for a specific indigenous person, I’ll general use the name of the tribe (e.g., “the Lakota fellow” rather than “the Native American fellow”). A lot of the indigenous folks in this area (Montana) call themselves Indian even though it’s taboo elsewhere. I see “NDN” a fair amount, too, but that’s for them to call themselves, not for us to call them.
Native American is absolutely an adjective. There are Native American people, Native American artifacts, Native American sites…
That’s why I was careful not to say they will change their minds, just that it’s their minds that need to be changed.
I try to do the best I can with grammar, but this gets away from me. If Native American is a adjective, why is it capitalized in your examples?
If I say “this is a Monet original” or “that’s a Chevrolet engine”, is that the same as your NA examples? I think it may be a case of using a noun as an adjective.
I noticed that both Barack and Michelle Obama use lower-case “black” in their respective books, and, being thus in pretty good company, so will I. I wouldn’t ask or expect anyone to capitalize “white,” either.
Are we headed down the descriptivist vs. prescriptivist rabbit hole here? As I said above, it’s difficult to keep up in an ever-changing landscape, and English words are constantly transitioning into different parts of speech. IMHO, if a significant portion of the populace uses a word as an adjective, at some point you stop calling it “a noun used as an adjective” and just call it an adjective.
I do not consider myself qualified to say where Native American is on that timeline, so perhaps I should have said “Native American is absolutely used as an adjective.”
On the other hand, I just checked the Cambridge English Dictionary and dictionary.com and they both list “Native American” as an adjective.
I’m surprised to find some people so cranky about capitalizing the B in Black. I’ve been doing it fairly consistently for years. Few people use the term “African-American” any longer. It’s too much of a mouthful. If we’re going to use Black as the term for the ethnicity (or as close to it as we’re going to get) of people with African ancestry, it makes no sense not to capitalize it.
So, and again, I’m not saying all colors matter, but if Black as the term for ethnicity should be capitalized (because ethnic terms are capitalized), then shouldn’t white be capitalized when used as a term for ethnicity?
Were their books written in the last two months? If not, this isn’t a useful data point. There is a groundswell now to change the usage. If you really want to follow his lead, why not go with some of his recent writing?
Slight hijack: I tend to use the term African-American more often than not. Is this going to get me in trouble soon?
Also, I have been capitalizing Black for a long time now. Was I not supposed to until recently?
I find using Black and not White, disconcerting because of the reasoning behind the AP style
AP’s style is now to capitalize Black in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense, conveying an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa
I find it uncomfortably racist because it smacks to much like “Black people are all alike.”
I suppose so, but it would make more sense to do that if we stopped using specific ethnicities like Irish, Italian, Greek, etc. The confusing factor is, of course, race, the scientifically nonsensical but socially unavoidable concept. We tend to only use the term “white” when speaking of race, not ethnicity. We have no real ethnicity for most Americans of African descent, and now we use a term that blurs the line between race and ethnicity.
In some ways, African seems like a better term (without the -American, which we seldom use for other ethnic groups). However, there are difficulties there, as there are Blacks who identify ethnically as Jamaican, Bahamanian, etc.