I see people referred to as a “Black” community leader, but White only when it refers to supremicists, at least as far as I can recall? Why is this?
Just a guess: I think capitalizing a word emphasises respect for what it represents. Or emphasise it as being relevant to the context in which it is being used. People do it for those reasons. Not saying it’s correct to do so.
For example I feel I am being disrespectful if I don’t capitalize the G in God. (I am an Atheist who tries to respect the other side in debates. Emphasis on ‘tries’)
I agree with Lobsang. Lower-case ‘black’ or ‘white’ is just a colour. (OK, not technically; but you know what I mean.) Upper-case ‘Black’ or ‘White’ refers to people, just as do Caucasian or Asian.
I’ve seen White used other than for White supremacists; such as, ‘The robber was a White guy.’
I presume it’s because the words are felt to be proper adjectives in this context, so that it is appropriate to capitalize them. Similarly, “Democratic” and “Republican”, and “Libertarian” are capitalized when referring to the political parties, but not when referring to political concepts.
This is usually it. People also refer to Reds (Communists) and Greens (political party). “Black” and “White” is similar to the capitalization of “Latino” or “Hispanic.”
Interestingly, when the word black first began to replace Negro in American English, it was specifically not capitalized at the insistence of the black community seeking the change. Negro, taken from scientific literature, is capitalized, just as Caucasian is. However, in newspapers and other publications, it was far more common to use the word white, (lowercase) than Caucasian (upper case), and (capitalized) Negro, and the argument put forth by the black community was that the two identifiers should be equal in value and appearance, rather than separating out the black community by using a special word that emphasized differences (or, in extreme cases, permitted racists of that period to use the word Negro as though it indicated a separate subspecies or even species.)
In the intervening years, memories of the original arguments have faded and different people capitalize or fail to capitalize based on understandings that they have encountered on their own. The Chicago Manual of Style has permitted capitalization since 1993, (at least), and I suspect that the editors were following a trend that began around 1980–a bit more than a decade after the original change.
I continue to use the lower case versions of both words, simply because I watched that discussion unfold during a formative period in my life.