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Comment by _pius | Hacker News Reader

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.”

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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.

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.

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