There’s a great Patton Oswalt clip that basically boils down to ‘I’ll call you whatever you want me to call you, just give me some time to catch up, I’m trying my best but you can’t get mad at me for using the wrong term today when it was right last week and no one told me it changed’.
Regarding descriptivist vs. prescriptivist, I’m not going anywhere near that. I’m a math/science guy and avoided all the English/Lit/Com classes I could throughout high school and college.
This. I capitalize “Black” when I am referring to the group of people called that in the US. I’ve done it for 15 or 20 years, since a Black colleague asked me to, saying that it bothered her that every other “group” identifier was routinely capitalized, and hers wasn’t. (Irish, Jewish, Native American, etc.)
So I’d say that she is Black, and that she has black hair and medium-brown skin.
I am not OCD about spelling, punctuation, or capitalization, and it makes pretty much no difference to me. But she cares, and I’ve never run into anyone who OBJECTED to my calling them Black.
So… 1 to 0, I go with Black. And to be fair, she claimed to be speaking for others, not just for herself.
Upon further reflection, I think the OP makes the issue too … well … black and white. It assumes that there is a single monolithic Black culture and that everybody in it has come to agreement on whether that capital B should be used for all of them.
I’m just your basic white guy, so I can’t speak from any kind of authority here. I can, however, draw a parallel with my prior experience.
Earlier in my career, I worked extensively on technology for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Until I got involved in their world, I thought there was such a thing as the “deaf community.” I was wrong. Oh, so very wrong. The community was split between Deaf (“big-D Deaf”) and deaf (“little-d deaf”) people, depending on whether they’d been deaf since birth or deafened later in life. Some considered all pre-lingually deaf people to be big-D Deaf, and some didn’t. Some considered hard-of-hearing people little-d deaf and some considered them a third category. Some considered hearing-impaired an umbrella term for all deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Others considered it an epithet. Some, mostly little-d deaf, thought of cochlear implants as a gift from Heaven. Others, mostly big-D Deaf, thought of them as selling out their culture to go mainstream
The technology I worked on (television closed captioning) was strongly supported by post-lingually deaf people whose first language was English, but pre-lingually Deaf people whose first language was ASL or SEE often felt the time and money would be better spent on sign interpreters.
I learned a lot from that experience, and if I apply it to the OP’s question, I will assume that “Black culture” is similarly fragmented with even deeper divisions. No matter whether we use black or Black, we will sometimes be wrong and we will sometimes be misinterpreted. All we can do is follow style guides where they exist and do our damndest to be respectful and thoughtful when they don’t.
I see that Black and White are both being capitalized in the Washington Post now, at least in the article I just happened to read.
OK, after a few days of thought, I will continue this policy:
I will use black to refer to people whose only known distinguishing feature is skin color.
I will use Black to refer to people who have formed a cohesive group who have defined their commonality, and have expressed a wish to be called Black.
I’m not hard to get along with.
I haven’t been following this convention in my own writing. I’m not eager to adopt this style, but that’s not because I am opposed to it. It’s just that I am naturally resistant to change.
Yeah - what is the agreed definition of w/White? I lived in NW IN for a while, where it was so white that you didn’t even see any folk of “Mediterranean” heritage - not only no Blacks or browns, but no Asians (E or S), and not even any “swarthy” Greeks or Italians.
I’d probably suggest that folk of northern/western European heritage share at least as much history, identity, and community as Blacks.
I’ll look that up. Sounds pretty consistent with what I feel.
Start at 2:50 if it’s not already cued up.
Thx - amusing. I especially like the 2 examples given near the end.
AFAIK, all B(b)lack folk didn’t get together, vote, and select ‘Black’ as the approved descriptor. Instead it was a preference indicated by a subsection of black folk here in the US.
It’s fine if those guys want to be referred to in that way so I don’t mind doing so for them. Now what if some sub-section of white folk decide that they want to be referred to as ‘Whites’. What then? Do we do so?
If not, why not? That’s just a kettle of fish that I want no part of deciding.
The rule isn’t “if there’s a subset of people who want something, you must obey them.” All that’s asked is that you evaluate the request and why people are requesting it, and then make your own decision.
I believe the people requesting that I use upper-case Black to recognize it as a culture, not a color, have made a valid request, so I will support it.
To date, people who make the same argument about “white” fall into two camps: those who don’t really feel that “white” is a shared culture but want to make sure they get everything (and more) that Black people have, and those who feel it is a shared culture of supremacy. I don’t feel the need to support either of those, so I will use “white” for now. If someone puts forth a reasonable argument to capitalize it, I will reevaluate.
I still work in SDH/CC for hearing impaired people. Some of our clients have specifically requested that we use “Black” only when referring to Black people, of course. Others have also considered capitalizing Brown people and White people.
I agree. Although as I said above, I also weigh the evidence that some people (including my extremely reasonable friend) take offense at being called “black” and I’ve yet to run into a reasonable person who is offended by being called “Black”. I do like to avoid randomly offending people.
Well, I’ve started capitalizing it if I am using it in the same sentence as where I capitalized “Black”, mostly because it looks weird otherwise. That’s probably the only time I capitalize it. I agree that the logical argument to do so is weak, and if a style guide said to capitalize “Black” but not other colorful descriptors of people, I’d be good with that. I don’t capitalize “brown”, in part because when I use that descriptor I usually want it to be interpreted as a very broad bucket, and not a coherent “group”. So by that logic, I should return to “white”.
I’m pretty inconsistent in my capitalization. For some reason, my phone decided that “i” is a legit word, and it’s enough of a nuisance to manually correct that to “I” that I usually don’t bother. Same with some proper names that are also English words. So I have plausible deniability! Also, I suppose that means that in general, I don’t care a lot about capitalization. I mostly make sure to capitalize “Black” as a courtesy to my friend.
Interesting piece on this in today’s HuffPost.
Apparently the new AP style guide capitalizes not only Black, but Indigenous, as well.