zlacker

>>danso+(OP)
Why is "Black" capitalized, but "white" is not?

>>joshua+fh
I don't know what style guide ProPublica uses, but very recently AP decided to capitalize Black when used as a cultural term when it conveys "essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black". They go on to say that they expect to make a decision soon about whether to do that with "white" as well.

https://blog.ap.org/announcements/the-decision-to-capitalize... https://apnews.com/71386b46dbff8190e71493a763e8f45a

>>jfenge+5j
And boy, those must be some fraught discussions. I think of myself as white but not White, because the notion White Culture connotes white supremacy. Black people outside of Africa share a common element of diaspora, at the very least defined in terms of their shared difficulties, while I as a white person in the west define myself more closely with smaller ethnic and national groups than with whiteness as a whole.

Still... the terminology of race is never going to be precise, and to the degree it exists at all, I'm going to be seen as white rather than another thing. So we might as well be parallel, and use White along with Black and Indigenous and other tendentious but sometimes useful categories.

So if I had to bet, that's where I suspect AP will land. But I don't envy them the process of coming to that conclusion, or the backlash they're going to get either way.

>>jfenge+ml
> while I as a white person in the west define myself more closely with smaller ethnic and national groups than with whiteness as a whole.

Sure, but how do others define you? Consider that tech companies and activists are trying to redefine the meaning of racism to allow others to discriminate against you based on the color of your skin.