You are misunderstanding me. If I do not know how someone prefers to be addressed or referred to, and they are from Africa, I call them African, without reference to skin tone. Of course, if I know what state they come from I can call them Nigerian, or South African. I know a family of refugees here in the US, for example, who don’t seem to have a country, because the mother and father spent more than a decade in refugee camps in several African countries and the children have known no other life. Where are they from? Africa. They are dark skinned, you would call them “black”. Maybe small b maybe large, it’s ambiguous. I’m guessing the children will grow up identifying as Black, but the parents? They don’t speak English, they know little of American Black culture or any American culture. Their friends are other African refugees.
That’s not strictly true - there definitely is an overarching “Black” culture that crosses nationalities like Zulu and Xhosa, especially nowadays when a) there is some cross-nation intermarriage and b) there’s a large population of African immigrants. These factors and others combine to create what’s sometimes also called “Township culture”, where people speak a creole and socialize as Blacks across national lines.
Looks like - it seemed like you were saying you would say “African” instead of “Black” for Black Africans.
Good to know - thanks! Yeah, I wasn’t saying this doesn’t exist at all in South Africa, just that it’s relatively more salient in the US, which lacks equivalents of Zulu, etc. altogether.
The Nation of Islam notwithstanding. 
Yes, I would – but I note that my knowledge of the various African cultures is not nearly extensive enough to do much of anything else without other directives, and I don’t have occasion to need to bone up on it. As always, I merely try to avoid offense.
Yeah, if we are talking about the actual color of skin, people tend to range from pale pink through dark brown. I guess people sometimes say “he’s white as a sheet” to indicate the blood has (mostly) left the skin.
Interesting to learn. Thanks.
Biologists agree with you; however, the simple fact of the matter is that societies all around the world have divided peoples into racial groups and treated people differently depending on the perceived racial groups.
I really do not understand how someone who grew up in those countries does not understand racism. Did you miss or never learn of apartheid? <–rhetorical question.
Regarding the Australian Aborigines: have you never heard of the Stolen Generations? The Australian Blacks were treated horribly by the Australian government for decades, if not longer.
I seriously doubt this is true, so I must ask: cite? I believe the Irish were always considered white in America, just not all that desirable.
Care to explain how your bullshit applies to those major press and media outfits using the capital letter before Geroge Floyd was murdered?
Horseshit. There is absolutely no equivalency between slavery of Blacks and whites automatically being considered part of the dominant racial group in the United States. I really thought the Post was better than this.
No, he’s not.
Way I think about it is, dollars have no basis in physics or chemistry. They’re purely a social construct; and, what’s more, they’re defined differently by different cultures and at different times. You’d be hard-pressed to come up with a definition of “a dollar” that’s specific enough to be useful and broad enough to apply to every occasion in which the word is used. But if you go around saying, “I don’t see dollars,” you’re going to look like a fool.
Race is a lot like dollars, only worse.
This is a controversial idea. As far as I can tell, it depends on what you mean by White, and the degree to which White supremacy was once Anglo supremacy. Certainly it appears that at times the supposedly darker skin of Irish immigrants was used by supposedly paler folks of British descent to imply that Irish folks were subhuman.
Well yes. Irish and Poles and Italians after them: a cut above NonWhite, but only just.
Sure. I can say that…I don’t have any intentional preconceptions,I did my utmost to remove them.
I very much dislike my own white privilege. It is completely unfair to a large group of people, many of whom ended up as colleagues and friends. I mean, yes, I have profited from my white privilege but I am not special just because of my skin colour - in my opinion. White privilege tends to favour the opposite, which I completely disagree with.
I meant, I don’t understand racisim. I grew up in early Zimbabwe with multiracial school classes. A pretty homogeneous (though i must note, middle class) society. Why hate your best friend? My kids go to multiracial schools. Their friends are acoss the spectrum of skin colour. The whole concept is bizarre
Now @octopus has entered this thread, I’d prefer to step out.
I have made a request to the mods to close it…
Automatically? How does “targets of racial and ethnic discrimination” + “eventually assimilated” = “automatically”?
Those are three very different people of three very different ethnicities and backgrounds. Would they all fit under whatever definition of “Black” you are using? Would they appreciate you doing so? Are you using capital B black for a specific reason? If so, what is that reason?
Personally, absent any other explanation from you I’d assume you were lumping them together on skin tone alone. I suspect many others would assume that also. In that respect your use of that term might not cause any great uncertainty in a wide audience.
Oh come on. That’s the sort of absurdly pedantic nonsense my autistic 11 year old kid tries with me when he’s trying to weasel out of doing chores.
“Black” when used as a descriptor generally means of African descent. You’d describe a Congolese man as “black”, but not necessarily “Black”. Same for someone like Lenny Henry who’s neither African, nor Black in the capitalized sense of being part of the US Black community.
It’s a sort of verbal shorthand meant to describe someone of African descent without going into all the words that describe that, and there’s nothing wrong with using it as such- it’s not racist any more than saying someone is asian, hispanic, white, etc…
IMO, going out of your way to NOT use terms like that is just virtue signaling.
It may not be racist, but it’s certainly divisive. And it’s meant to be. Black and white are opposite colours. They are two different categories, never mind all the shades of grey in between. That was my point about not knowing and black or white people. If see other human beings as part of the same continuum rather than separate categories, for which the labels are not even accurate, then we might have an actual opportunity for empathy.
I quite specifically picked 3 people who I knew have themselves claimed Black identity (among their other identities, such as Latino or Iranian)
It’s what I’ve always used, it’s what I was taught during the Struggle, I see no reason to change, especially now that it’s becoming more the norm.
In the same thread where I’ve been pointing out that Romesh is Brown? His skin tone is way darker than Cordova’s. That’s an assumption people are free to make, but it’s not one I actually feed. That’s entirely on them/you.
No, it’s a very real distinction.
Tell that to Australian Aborigines.
I wouldn’t.
Americans don’t own capital letters, and Blacks outside America have used it for themselves for years.
And your authority to decide for me what is and isn’t wrong for me to say when it comes to race-related things is what, exactly?
Actually, no, fuck that, that was way too polite.
Fuck you and your insulting, infantilizing, disabling analogy. I’m an adult Brown man with a long history with racism, and you can fuck off with comparing me to your chore-shucking by-blow, motherfucker.
People actually don’t use terms like “asian” and “hispanic” for people. They capitalize both of those. Unless they’re trying to virtue-signal their dumb-ass contrariness, that is.
Did you miss that I’ve been using Black for about two decades, since a colleague said she preferred it? And that many of the media switched before George Floyd’s murder? This is hardly a brand new thing.
Just wanna pop in here and mention I’ve been an English editor for post production for over 21 years. Clients requested “black” be capitalized since before 2018. Each company I’ve worked for and in tandem with has this as a basic rule for company guidelines. Printed media started this well before the post industry did. So it’s not really a new thing. The general rule is capitalize the word when “referring to Black people or Black culture.”
If nothing else, this thread is a great example of how difficult in can be to categorize people. We’re complicated. If someone were to ask me my ethnicity, I’d say American. I’m also comfortable with white, though you’ll see I don’t capitalize it as it’s just not my custom, and if you press me I might talk about my Scottish roots. One of the reasons I don’t mind White is because I’m not really Scottish. My ancestors arrived in what would become the United States prior to the 1770s, at this point I can’t really say my ethnicity is Scottish or even Scotch-Irish, and some other places don’t even recognize the Scotch-Irish as a distinct group. What’s a fella to do?
That is a great description, especially since a lot of countries call their currency dollar currently. The New Zealand dollar is not the same as the