zlacker

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+(OP)
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+(OP)
Capitalizing "Black" is in response to people who identify as Black doing so, I believe. Doing so for people who identify as capital-W "White" would be very different and hand them a victory that will badly distort public debate.

It's amazing how powerful just applying capitalize() to a string can be.

>>jfenge+h2
> 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.

>>nailer+5v
Exactly right, and in fact I am often excluded from whiteness on account of being Jewish. The most explicit white supremacists construct Whiteness very narrowly. And it's in opposition to white supremacy that a notion of Blackness is more important: not how they see themselves, but how they are treated, and how that treatment affects their lives.

I would be considered white in most circumstances so I get a pass from a lot of discrimination that affects others. And that's why I consider it important to take a stand against that discrimination -- though unfortunately, the people propagating the worst of that discrimination see me as a traitor.