Interesting observation. I'm not convinced it's because it's referring to a group per se. In that example, I think it's the "the" which creates that sense of ot

Interesting observation. I'm not convinced it's because it's referring to a group per se. In that example, I think it's the "the" which creates that sense of other-ness. Contrast: Jews are a growing demographic in America The Jews are a growing demographic in America The first seems neutral, while the second seems critical. With the latter, I get the distinct impression that the writer has negative views of Jews and doesn't count themselves among that group, but with the former, I don't get any impression either way. Here's another example. "Study: Blacks in U.S. remain at higher heart disease risk than whites" (https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2021/study-blacks-us-remain-higher-heart-disease-risk-whites https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2021/study-blacks-us-remain-h...). This sentence feels neutral, at least for a headline, and not dehumanizing of either black people or white people. At any rate, my belief is that playing semantic games doesn't help to improve peoples' empathy. I think whatever empathy exists was already there, and semantic games are at best a filter to detect which people were empathetic already, and which people were not. Unfortunately, this filter has a high false-negative rate that mis-classifies empathetic people who just can't keep up with ever-evolving language trends.