Lower cased “black” is no more appropriate for a Tamil than upper cased “Black”. And some people misidentifying a Tamil as Black doesn’t speak to whether Black should be capitalized.
Fair enough, and I’ll leave you to your anger. I hope you’ll find a more deserving target for it in the future.
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No it isn’t exclusionary. Africans are people who live in Africa, and some of them have black skin, some brown, and so the fuck what.
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If people on any continent want to be called Black, I will call them that. I call people what they want to be called, by and large. Also so the fuck what. I describe what I think of when I call someone Black, and it isn’t African.
? I’m baffled how anybody who’s on these boards even a fair amount, or even has been reading anything about race in America over the past few decades, can consider this a “new trend” that still needs explanation on the “what’s up with” level.
Most recently, AFAICT, the discussion flared up in this August 2021 Pit thread, shortly after this July 2021 FQ thread on the same subject. As noted in that first link, this is a question that’s been canvassed in the writing of English for years and years.
That doesn’t mean we can’t discuss it afresh here, just that it seems weird to me that anybody not living under a rock would consider it a “new trend”.
Fair enough. I have not read either thread, and I did not search to see if my topic had been asked and answered.
I agree with the first sentence (that’s why I said “dark skin”).
I don’t agree entirely with the second. As capitalized Black becomes more common, it will (I posit) reinforce the idea (for some people who hadn’t internalized this already) that it’s a cultural distinction, and some of these folks will be less likely to assume a dark-skinned person is culturally Black. Some might evince some curiosity about the person’s actual culture that they might not have considered otherwise.
Here’s a question no one in this thread has asked. Should /b/rown be capitalized?
The term “brown” as a racial or ethnic description should also generally remain lowercase and should be used with care. “Brown” has been used to describe such a disparate range of people — Latin, Indigenous, Asian, Middle Eastern — that the meaning is often unclear to readers. A more specific description is generally best.
On Monday, we joined the growing list of news organizations around the country that have opted to capitalize Black when using the word to describe a culture, ethnicity or community of people. We made this decision after engaging in dialogues with people inside and outside our newsroom and company, including readers and employees.
We also instructed our journalists that in the event the terms Black and Brown are used together to collectively describe a group, we will capitalize the “B” in both words, such as “Black and Brown communities.”
Both of these announcements occurred in 2020, so it is unquestionably a new trend in mainstream culture (which is mostly /w/hite culture), although it started much earlier. (The Chicago Reporter: “[B]efore Black became a widely accepted term, Robert Abbott, founder of The Defender, initiated capitalizing Negro becoming the standard in the Black press.” It had earlier been advocated by W.E.B. Dubois.] No question that the George Floyd tragedy was the instigating force in mainstream American culture and reporting.
Should /w/hite be capitalized?
The Associated Press said no. In response, sociologist Eve L. Ewing argued yes.
As long as White people do not ever have to interrogate what Whiteness is, where it comes from, how it operates, or what it does, they can maintain the fiction that race is other people’s problem, that they are mere observers in a centuries-long stage play in which they have, in fact, been the producers, directors, and central actors.
The Center for the Study of Social Policy and others make the same argument. But the American Medical Association is capitalizing /w/hite for other reasons, but apparently not /b/rown.
If you are writing for one of these publications, whatever form you use will be conformed by an editor.
If you are not, and I assume that 99.9% of you are not, then you can make your own decisions. Is one form more correct than the other? In terms of language, not at all. In terms of cultural sensibility, each choice now connotes a meaning and people can and will judge you for which one you pick. That’s a real problem. This early into a transitional era, no consensus exists for a reader who does not know you to understand how or why you use one form and not another; therefore readers can and will read into your meaning according to their own worldview. Readers do this all the time for everything in any case, including stuff you never even considered readable into, as any linguist understands, but terms of offense, discrimination, prejudice, and exclusion are special cases. Racists are often labeled and even self-labeled as White Supremacists, with both words capitalized, but also often not. Which is correct? Nobody knows.
What should you do? Beats me. The language is in turmoil and has not settled on common neutral usage. Personally I’m leaning toward capitalizing all three for the sake of consistency, but I’d be leery of doing so without explanation if readers from either side of the equation read into White that it implies a superiority claimed by a master race.
This is kind of why I asked the OP question. I don’t feel the need to interrogate my skin colour. I do recognise fully white privilege, I would not be where I am financially and socio-economicly without that extra boost.
If I had been born into a more egalitarian society, I would not have that advantage. I’m not sure which culture/society that would be.
It is truely bizzare to me.
Is brown used in anything other than a derogatory sense? I’m not sure it’s really even used by racists, I’ve most often heard it used to mock racists for how they view POC generically, lacking any awareness of their actual ethnicity. I would be shocked to hear someone actually described as a “brown person” unironically.
But we as a society need to keep interrogating it (if I understand the meanings you have in mind for this word). Do you want to help that process along, or hinder it?
Yep, so if you’re saying “African” instead of “Black”, you’re excluding some of them.
I want to ignore it.
Of course, that is impossible, due to my ancestors comitting henious crimes on other people.
So I must just accept the kick-back, and accept it in as reasonable manner as possible.
Well said, I think!
I capitalize it when I use it as a group descriptor, yes. I identify as Brown, for example.
Very much so, in the sphere of identity politics.
On those bloody apartheid era forms (home affairs) I always write “n/a”. I fucking hate that I should choose my race.
It’s a stupid thing. My colour is pinkish. My ex-girlfriends step-mum is Brown. The bouncer at a bar I occasionally go to is black. Not “Black” - he’s not American - he’s a French speaking Congolese guy.
It’s all so pointless.
Thats why I said upthread, I don’t understand racism.
I’ve definitely heard brown by people in Hispanic and South Asian communities to describe themselves or others.
I only recall hearing it used (US English) twice, both times to refer to Latinos, with very different contexts:
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Holly Near is (was?) a leftist folksinger in the 1980s, in the manner of Arlo Guthrie or Pete Seeger. She sang a song critiquing the Reagan administration (and US political culture) that included the line: “Why are so many of our soldiers black or brown? Is it because we think they’re good at cutting other people down?” Definitely not derogatory intent.
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A couple years later, the first President George Bush got into mild hot water for calling his half-Latino grandchildren (Jeb’s kids) the “little brown ones in the corner” (of a family photo). If (today) this happened, and he had in mind “little Brown ones,” rather than referring to skin color, he might have gotten away with deeming it a hip cultural distinction! (Or not.)
I don’t know what you mean by “the sphere of identity politics”. As a technical term in academia?
I would certainly be shocked to hear anyone described unironically as a brown person in everyday conversation. As a Brit, that’s something I’d associate with the racism compounded by ignorance of >3 generations ago. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it in the U.S., the racists here tend to make their ignorance apparent by mis-guessing someone’s ethnicity in their choice of derogatory epithet.
I do see from a quick google that there are a few situations where people now or historically may have self-identified as brown, obviously I’ve never encountered any in my own life, I guess I just have the association with racism.
No, in political groups. It’s not my preferred flavour of politics, but several groups I’m in contact with are identity-based ones.
I hear British-Asians calling themselves Brown all the time. Here’s Romesh Ranganathan using it in a tweet:
https://twitter.com/romeshranga/status/913891101248978946
It’s becoming more common in America, and elsewhere from what I read.
“Brown” has been used as a term in popular culture for some South Asian Americans, Middle Eastern Americans and some Latino Americans either as a pejorative term or sometimes for self-identification, as with brown identity. Judith Ortiz Cofer notes that appellation varies according to geographical location, observing that in Puerto Rico she is considered to be a white person, but in the United States mainland, she is considered to be a “brown person.”[26] Moustafa Bayoumi, an Egyptian-American professor of English at Brooklyn College, identified himself as a “brown Arab-American” in an opinion piece criticizing the United States Census for forcing self-identified brown persons to identify as white.[27]
The diversity of America - and therefore the diversity of American racism - extends beyond Whites and Blacks, even though that’s sometimes expressed as the only meaningful division. That’s why the term BIPOC - Black, Indigenous, and People of Color - as coined. “The term aims to emphasize the historic oppression of black and indigenous people, which is argued to be superlative and distinctive in U.S. history at the collective level.[24] The BIPOC Project promotes the term in order “to highlight the unique relationship to whiteness that Indigenous and Black (African Americans) people have, which shapes the experiences of and relationship to white supremacy for all people of color within a U.S. context”.[25]” It’s not a term I would use, and that Wiki article notes that many people have a problem with it.
Both Red and Yellow have finally become offensive terms in America. All people of color who are not black can be considered Brown, including Indigenous people, but also Hispanics, Arabs, Iranians, and South Asians. Since Yellow is now an offensive term, East Asians are sometimes included. As earlier racist boundaries become eliminated, new boundary lines are being drawn from inside and from outside the communities. I think it’s likely that Brown, simple and reductive, will increasingly be used to distinguish from Black and White. Is that good or bad? Some of both, but language usually votes for simple.