Stanford archive to highlight Black histories of Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Stanford archive to highlight Black histories of Silicon Valley

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17 pointsarthur_pryor18 comments

There’s a recent trend (I think) capitalizing the word Black when referring to skin color. I don’t think it’s a great trend, making skin color into a proper noun.

It’s solidifying and enforcing barriers that already exist but shouldn’t be enshrined.

Even eerier seeing “White” written like that, it shrieks of supremacy.

This may or may not change your mind on the topic.

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php

From the article:

To capitalize Black, in her view, is to acknowledge that slavery “deliberately stripped” people forcibly shipped overseas “of all other ethnic/national ties.” She added, “African American is not wrong, and some prefer it, but if we are going to capitalize Asian and South Asian and Indigenous, for example, groups that include myriad ethnic identities united by shared race and geography and, to some degree, culture, then we also have to capitalize Black.”

So by that logic Obama should be small capital black since his father was from the wrong side of Africa and not a slave. When will we have our first Black president who isn't just black?

And what of the whites in Africa. Do we capitalize only the Boers who suffered a genocide from the British? Is Musk the only W white we can talk about? That poor richest man with such historic baggage. Truly the best role model for all African Americans.

Oh the racialist hierarchies we build.

So by that logic Obama should be small capital black since his father was from the wrong side of Africa and not a slave … Oh the racialist hierarchies we build.

Not sure why you’re injecting inflammatory bile into an otherwise civil thread. If you read past the first sentence, you’ll refute your own point. Think before trolling.

I really do think this rings of a similar problem of Americans imposing their lens of reality onto the rest of the English-speaking world.

I never saw the capitalization as being about ethnic or racial identity and just due to the fact that e.g. countries or continents are capitalized.

I think it’s even more false to capitalize “Indigenous”, no?

Being “Asian” or “South Asian” are broad enough that they don’t refer to any particular ethnicity, nationality or culture.

This phenomenon exists everywhere.

(Disclaimer: English is second language, in my native language we don’t capitalize any of these words and even in English I would only do so when required by grammar, so it may impress me different than others)

Cultures without their own country are capitalized too.

Capitalizing indigenous is unusual. But capitalizing Native American is standard.

How would you describe someone like G.K. Butterfield, Mordecai Johnson, John Hope or Walter White then?

Without digging into the history of any of them: Male? American? People?

EDIT: Also, I'm a bit of the position that imposing these group identities on others is undesirable. If they all refer/referred to themselves as "Black" all good, otherwise I find it harmful to construct these lines between us unless in a particular context where the specific meaning is clear and it serves a valid purpose. Right now I feel it obstructs more than it clarifies.

I avoid referring to anyone by ethnicity or "race" in the general too fwiw (unless in a very specific context, like somebody getting sunburnt easily because of their skin color or being discriminated against because of somebody elses impression of it)

Well, all I ask for is consistency. If "Black" is to be capitalized, "White" should be too, all men (and women) being equal and whatnot (though I suppose you could argue "Caucasian" is capitalized).

Still, I don't like politicization of colors and I actively want to defuse attempts to politicize the word "black". It's getting so bad that literally the color black is coming under attack - for example the python formatter "black"[0]

[0] https://github.com/psf/black/issues/1830

> Well, all I ask for is consistency. If "Black" is to be capitalized, "White" should be too,

“White” as a label of an identity group is usually capitalized if Black is; the new AP style (and the similar Columbia Journalism Review style and some other, mostly journalistic, groups) is aberrant, not normal.

https://cssp.org/2020/03/recognizing-race-in-language-why-we...

https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/bias-free-...

https://www.macfound.org/press/perspectives/capitalizing-bla...

https://amastyleinsider.com/2020/07/01/updates-to-reporting-...

https://www.thewrap.com/cnn-capitalize-black-white-race/

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/about-us/readers-rep/st...

A polite request isn't an attack. And it looks like they were trolling.[1]

[1] https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/issues/304

In a lot of cases the request is only polite initially, and you'll get mobbed by Twitter if you politely decline.

I've seen dozens of these. 100% of the time a maintainer has closed it or people have dog piled the requester. Find an actual attack if you want to claim an attack.

> There’s a recent trend (I think) capitalizing the word Black when referring to skin color.

No, it's when referring to a racial identity group.

While the label for that group originates as a reference to the dark skin typical of the group, the capitalized term does not refer to, and does not have any necessary relation to, skin color.

Some Famous Inventions by Black inventors:

The Game Cartridge

The Super Soaker Squirt Gun

> The Game Cartridge

yeah, i was slightly surprised that jerry lawson (inventor of the game cartridge) wasn't mentioned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Lawson_(engineer)

Why does Jerry get the credit for cartridges? The Magnavox Odessey had cartridges about four years before the Model F.

I could see him getting credit for ROM cartridges - as I understand it the Odessey cartridges changed game play but didn't contain code.

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