“Who assumes the power to represent others as other, and on what basis?” – Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present
In answer to the question “Why capitalise Black” the answer is sometimes you should and sometimes you shouldn’t and there is no perfect rule that will apply to all and be acceptable to all.
You sort of answered your own question here. The capitalised “Black” is not appropriate for some people with dark skin and some of those people to whom it could apply don’t like the implications of being lumped in with all other people with dark skin.
Those to whom it does apply, and who want to be described in that way then of course capitalise away.
None of that is a problem of course if you merely speak to people, listen to what they say and adapt accordingly.
Is that not precisely the issue? Surely that then makes whites a special class. We are not special. We are humans, like everyone else.
I consider the concept of race to be completely bizarre social delusion. I am not some kind of Übermensch due to my skin color. I’m just a random human in a world where random humans have different skin colour.
As I said in a previous thread, “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.”
I can’t think of a situation where you would call someone “black” just because their skin was dark – say, a person with roots in southern India (like my wife). You might mention they had dark skin (or even, for a few, black skin), but not simply “black/Black.”
I would reply that most of those people would just as soon you not call them “black”, either. They are better described as “Tamil”, or whatever they identify as.
In the US, “Black” has a fairly specific meaning, and it’s inappropriate to lump other people into that bucket, even if they happen to have dark skin.
Exactly.
I agree with all of that, that bucketing does happen though and it annoys a lot of people with darker skin.
Here you’re getting into a different issue – whether we should tend to identify people as belonging to certain groups, rather than just as humans. That’s a big and complicated issue, and I tend to agree with you that it’s a worthy goal (but, as a White person, my unearned privilege makes it easier for me to make that argument, perhaps).
In this thread, let’s stick to the original question, which assumes we will continue to call each other things for a while yet.
I suppose it is something like the pronoun thing.
I’m totally willing to refer to someone as (capitalised) “Black” if that is what they desire.
I don’t care particularly that “white” is not, the OP was triggered by reading a newspaper article which featured both.
@MrDibble - I am in McGregor, looking after a couple of dogs, so too far from the mountain, sadly
Whiteness studies are not separate from White as a descriptor for a human over-culture. What a ridiculous thing to claim.
Whiteness and its effects aren’t “academic” to me and mine, is all I’ll say to that bullshit. I have conversations about it on the regular, including with African-Americans.
Someone missed something, alright - did you miss that that whole conversation was about the word “white” regardless of capitalization? It wasn’t about whether racists use “White” or “white”, it was about racists being the ones who use white as a cultural descriptor - rather than say Irish-American or French-American. That was what I was addressing.
Capitalization is the main issue, but not what that particular side-discussion was about.
In my own company that is exactly what has happened. I don’t want to get too specific but one gentleman originally from Sri Lanka was not happy they were encompassed by the descriptor “Black”. They wouldn’t have been any more comfortable with a lower-case version. A USA colleague of Brazillian heritage specifically dislikes the capitalised version.
As I say, there is no perfect way around this other than dealing with people where they stand and in a perfect world, as an individual.
Avoid newspapers and go have a pint at Saggy Stone, then 
Well, that arose from pure ignorance among the those who described him thus.
My Tamil-rooted, but very US American, wife has plenty of stories like this. Actually, the confusion has served a purpose in the past couple of years: She substitute teaches in an elementary school, and the few Black kids (especially in first or second grade) brighten up when she walks in the room, and engage with her in ways they don’t always do with their White teachers. True, this is a case of children being (forgivably) “ignorant.” Obviously, she doesn’t tell them, “Guess what – I’m not Black!” – she just responds to their eagerness in kind.
/hijack, but perhaps illuminating in its way
You may be aware that Brazilians have long prided themselves (in an exaggerated way – just like in the US, skin color corelates rather well with socioeconomic class) – as a “post-racial society,” where most people have both European and some African roots. There’s some truth to this – mixing was acknowledged and practiced earlier and at a greater scale in Brazil than in, say, the US.
So, perhaps your Brazilian-American colleague was okay with someone describing him as having dark-ish skin (“black”), but didn’t identify with African American (“Black”) culture – no surprise there.
It was a corporate box-ticking exercise and a rather inelegant and reductive one at that, his was far from the only complaint. There was a large degree of malicious compliance where many people took umbrage at being forced to describe themselves by some clunky descriptors and being challenged by what they chose. There were many inventive answers being adopted after that point as you can imagine.
Nice. The US Census Bureau has evolved in a similar fashion. The number of “bi/multi-racial” Americans increased greatly from 2010 to 2020 (especially among those who also self-identify as Hispanic/Latino), for three reasons:
- The Census form had many more options for self-identification;
- “Mixed marriages” continue to become more common, so there are more kids out there self-identifying thus;
- Some people are becoming more comfortable expressing their complex identity, as the culture becomes more accepting of nuances.
I think that this distills the answer to my OP.
I had not realised that “Black” refers to a culture, and (IMHO, pretty racist) “black” refers to all dark skinned people.
Some ignorance fought, thank you.
Indeed, to the untrained eye you’d perhaps guess they had a mixed race heritage (to paraphrase them “I have no idea what colour you’d call me”) but they were adamant that the capitalised “B” was not for them.
That’s the gist of it, as I understand it – but it’s a little more nuanced, I think. Lower-case “black” could be construed as referring to skin color, whereas Black is much less likely to be so, because its capitalization resembles that of (say) Latino, or Ukrainian, or Khoi-San, or Navajo.