> all run by white European men in their twenties, I should say
Why should they say?
Why should they say?
Cherry-picking the detail you find most provocative and rushing to the comments to copy and complain about it is a recipe for poor-quality discussion. We're trying for better than that on HN. Especially in this case, where the provocation could not be more off topic. You should leave such things where you find them, not drag them in here and set them on fire. I'm sure that wasn't your intent—and really the upvoters do the greater part of the damage—but it is the effect nevertheless.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I also thought that comment felt very out of place in the article.
When I happened on this thread, it had been upvoted to the top and was choking out all discussion on the smaller, more obscure topic. That's a failure mode for HN.
When an article contains a provocation, flamewars don't start themselves. Someone has to import the provocation into the thread and start reacting to it here. From an HN perspective, that's the original sin - not the provocation itself. If we just left it in its original habitat and ignored it, nothing bad would happen.
Online discussion tends to gravitate to the few hottest, angriest, and most generic themes. Something about the mind gets stuck on those and wants to repeat them over and over. This is exciting in one way but it's not interesting in HN's sense of the word. Therefore it's off topic here. Threads like this one should be like a spaceship traveling to a little-known planet that hasn't been visited much. For that, we need to steer clear of black holes.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Per her Twitter, she views concentrations of white men in the music industry as "alarming" and "egregious." She encourages artists to boycott lineups where white men happen to comprise the majority of the artists. Her twitter replies, likes, and selective capitalization of white/Black indicate a strong ideological alignment.
https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1267836435756978179
https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2020/07/29/washington-post...
>AP’s style is now to capitalize Black in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense, conveying an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa.
Africa is larger in both land area and population than Europe and the United States combined. Black Africa is a population of greater linguistic [0], religious [1], cultural [2], and genetic [3] diversity than the white populations of Europe or the US. To the extent that a unified black identity exists, a unified white identity most exist also. Inventing one demonym to cover all black peoples of Africa and America, but not one that covers white Americans and/or Europeans, is not a decision based on history or evidence. It is purely an ideological decision, made through a uniquely American lens.
[0] https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/Science-Notebook/2015/0421...
"With more than 2,000 distinct languages, Africa has a third of the world's languages with less than a seventh of the world's population. By comparison, Europe, which has about an eighth of the world's population, has only about 300 languages."
[1] https://www.pewforum.org/2014/04/04/global-religious-diversi...
"12 countries have a very high degree of religious diversity. Six of the 12 are in the Asia-Pacific region; five are in sub-Saharan Africa; and one is in Latin America and the Caribbean. No countries in Europe, North America or the Middle East-North Africa region have a very high degree of religious diversity as measured in this study."
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/18/the-most-an...
"The usual suspects lead the list of culturally diverse countries: Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These and other African countries typically rank high on any diversity index because of their multitude of tribal groups and languages. The only western country to break into the top 20 most diverse is Canada."
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30318291
"Until now, most studies examining genetic risk factors for disease have focused on Europe. Little has been known about Africa, the most genetically diverse region in the world."
Without debating either of those points, how are they relevant to grammatical rules. The words are either proper nouns or they are not.
Why is race and gender so cheaply brought into everything, regardless if it has any relevancy?
It looks more to me like a lot of rich people doing their own thing seeking profits, and the result for the rest of us just ends up crappy as a by product. Traditional media makes a ton of money from outrage, so they forment and spin outrage, not to divide Americans (except as a by product), but because it makes them so much money.
They are two sides of the same coin. There is no single entity creating this atmosphere, just a bunch of outlets amplifying the most radical voices, as normal news and balanced debate is boring and not that profitable.
hip hop has a racial bias. I think that makes this somewhat relevant to note.
Just explaining why, I'm not making a normative claim here.