5 ms·

This is likely why: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php

ceejayoz 4y ago
Yep; the AP cited similar motivations (https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-9105661462 https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-910566...). I think CJR's is a better explanation; that many Black folks in the US have no idea which country their ancestors came from, and thus don't have the Irish / Chinese / German / etc. identifiers of origin many Americans honor and celebrate.
- gfdsgfsgf 4y ago
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    That is... not my experience. Tracing my family tree was a school assignment; I know folks who wear kilts because they've got a Scottish ancestor, or talk about their Italian grandmother's cooking, there's Greek and Korean and Italian and Puerto Rican and whatnot festivals annually in my city... https://archive.ph/1zKZF https://archive.ph/1zKZF > A basic tenet of genealogical research is that white Americans can more easily trace their European ancestors, while black Americans often face a “ brick wall” — a dearth of records before emancipation. Because enslaved people were considered property until after the Civil War, many enslaved people’s full names and identifying information are not included in documents that white Americans can use to track ancestors, such as annual census counts. But Ancestry.com’s attempt to provide context often does not take into account that white and black histories are fundamentally different.
obvslythrwy 4y ago
That article fails to explain why White isn't capitalized. It just claims in a very tautological manner that "capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists."
- kbenson 4y ago
  I think it fairly clearly made a case that in transporting people for slavery we stripped them of a lot of cultural identity, and now a lot of their identity is the lack of a prior one and their prior treatment in our nation, while white people often have other cultural identities and history to fall back on. Whether you agree with that or not is one thing, but I'm not sure why you're ignoring it.
  - just-ok 4y ago
    Well, it does completely ignore the cultural identity of African-descendant people who don’t have slaves as ancestors (some of which were actually facilitators of said transportations, as well, but I suppose that’s tangential).
    - barry-cotter 4y ago
      Also erasing the difference between descendants of slaves from the Americas and the descendants of people who were enslaved in the US. Colin Powell and Kamala Harris are the first without being the second.
- tsol 4y ago
  In America, Black people as a whole are a distinct cultural group with their own foods, words, holidays, mannerisms, and media. The are in the special case where they don't identify with their ancestral lands because all culture pertaining to that was forcibly stripped away. White people, at least in America, aren't a group with shared culture. The only thing that really unites them is the color of their skin. White people also tend to have an actual ancestral culture they identify with highly-- usually the culture of a European country their predecessors emigrated from. And as far as I know the vast majority of them don't want to identify as 'white', as they value their ancestral culture more.
  - jeofken 4y ago
    So a black person who moved from Africa is then lower-case black, because they are not part of the Black (uppercase) culture?

ceejayoz 4y ago

Yep; the AP cited similar motivations (https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-9105661462 https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-910566...). I think CJR's is a better explanation; that many Black folks in the US have no idea which country their ancestors came from, and thus don't have the Irish / Chinese / German / etc. identifiers of origin many Americans honor and celebrate.

gfdsgfsgf 4y ago
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  That is... not my experience. Tracing my family tree was a school assignment; I know folks who wear kilts because they've got a Scottish ancestor, or talk about their Italian grandmother's cooking, there's Greek and Korean and Italian and Puerto Rican and whatnot festivals annually in my city... https://archive.ph/1zKZF https://archive.ph/1zKZF > A basic tenet of genealogical research is that white Americans can more easily trace their European ancestors, while black Americans often face a “ brick wall” — a dearth of records before emancipation. Because enslaved people were considered property until after the Civil War, many enslaved people’s full names and identifying information are not included in documents that white Americans can use to track ancestors, such as annual census counts. But Ancestry.com’s attempt to provide context often does not take into account that white and black histories are fundamentally different.

obvslythrwy 4y ago

That article fails to explain why White isn't capitalized. It just claims in a very tautological manner that "capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists."

kbenson 4y ago
I think it fairly clearly made a case that in transporting people for slavery we stripped them of a lot of cultural identity, and now a lot of their identity is the lack of a prior one and their prior treatment in our nation, while white people often have other cultural identities and history to fall back on. Whether you agree with that or not is one thing, but I'm not sure why you're ignoring it.
- just-ok 4y ago
  Well, it does completely ignore the cultural identity of African-descendant people who don’t have slaves as ancestors (some of which were actually facilitators of said transportations, as well, but I suppose that’s tangential).
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    Also erasing the difference between descendants of slaves from the Americas and the descendants of people who were enslaved in the US. Colin Powell and Kamala Harris are the first without being the second.
tsol 4y ago
In America, Black people as a whole are a distinct cultural group with their own foods, words, holidays, mannerisms, and media. The are in the special case where they don't identify with their ancestral lands because all culture pertaining to that was forcibly stripped away. White people, at least in America, aren't a group with shared culture. The only thing that really unites them is the color of their skin. White people also tend to have an actual ancestral culture they identify with highly-- usually the culture of a European country their predecessors emigrated from. And as far as I know the vast majority of them don't want to identify as 'white', as they value their ancestral culture more.
- jeofken 4y ago
  So a black person who moved from Africa is then lower-case black, because they are not part of the Black (uppercase) culture?