Why is "black" being spelled with a capital "B"?
It emphasises blackness as an identity, i.e. it is a proper noun, the name of an ethnic group, and not just an adjective describing their skin colour.
I can't say I agree that society should be fracturing into more identities instead of fewer, or that people should strongly identify with their race, but that's the trend and that's we're at with the terminology.
It's not particularly new; labels used as names of racial identity groups have been capitalized for a long time; “Black” as a proper noun or proper adjective in that context has been capitalized for a long time (used as a common adjective describing skin color it isn't, and the usages can be hard to differentiate otherwise.)
> Both words denote a racial or ethnic identity and therefore should be upper case when referring to a person, community, culture, etc., in the same way CNN capitalizes other descriptors of race, ethnicity and shared identity, including African American, Native American, Hispanic or Latino, Asian, Asian American, African, and other terms
[1] https://www.thewrap.com/cnn-capitalize-black-white-race/
I read the NYT comments somewhat regularly and cannot recall ever seeing such a high proportion of the highlighted comments criticizing the NYT's position.
I give the NYT credit for highlighting these many critical comments, which appear to reflect the sentiment of the 'Reader Picks' comments as well.
It’s remarkable that journalists can claim, as the AP does, that white peoples don’t have a shared culture when they also write articles ascribing a culture to white people and blaming it for all of society’s problems. The obvious inconsistency just seems like racism against white people.
As far as I can tell, the new coinage of "Latinx" has no purpose except for signaling that you're one of the cool club. The vast majority of Latinos have never heard of it, and most of those who have don't like it.
Hardly anyone likes Latin@. It looks stranger than the others. It's hard to search for. There are at least 5 different ways to pronounce it.
Anglos use Latinx because it's the first gender neutral term spelled with all letters they learned.
I think most people who call themselves Latinx are fine with Latine when they hear about it. So probably Latine will take over.
I would think Latino/a applied more to Europe than in the Americas. When I first came to the States, I was surprised that Mexican-Americans were called Latino/a. Hispanic seemed more apt/correct than Latin. I had always associated it with Rome, not Spain.
The Latins https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latins [..] The Latins were originally an Italic tribe in ancient central Italy from Latium. As Roman power and colonization spread Latin culture, during the Roman Empire, Latins came to mean mostly unified Italic Latin-speaking people and the Latin-speaking people of Dacia, Iberia, Illyria, and Gaul whose land was settled by Roman colonists (see Latin peoples). Today, Latin people are those whose languages are derived from Latin; Italians, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanians, etc.
In the late 15th–16th centuries, a millennium after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Portugal and Spain began to create world empires. In consequence, by the mid-19th century, the former American colonies of these nations became known as Latin America and this region's inhabitants as Latin Americans.[..]
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black...
Being black is mostly an empirical fact. But being Black is about your experience and culture. Calling a random black person "Black" is making the same mistake as calling a random black person "African American".