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Comment by the_lonely_road | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t the AP the organization that insists Black be capitalized while insisting that White not be capitalized? They are just as biased and steeped in the culture war as anyone else. For the record I don’t care if both are capitalized or both are not but taking the divisive approach of choosing one and disallowing the other causes me to lose all trust in them.

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This is likely why: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php

Yep; the AP cited similar motivations (https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-910566...). I think CJR's is a better explanation; that many Black folks in the US have no idea which country their ancestors came from, and thus don't have the Irish / Chinese / German / etc. identifiers of origin many Americans honor and celebrate.

That article fails to explain why White isn't capitalized. It just claims in a very tautological manner that "capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists."

I think it fairly clearly made a case that in transporting people for slavery we stripped them of a lot of cultural identity, and now a lot of their identity is the lack of a prior one and their prior treatment in our nation, while white people often have other cultural identities and history to fall back on.

Whether you agree with that or not is one thing, but I'm not sure why you're ignoring it.

Well, it does completely ignore the cultural identity of African-descendant people who don’t have slaves as ancestors (some of which were actually facilitators of said transportations, as well, but I suppose that’s tangential).

Also erasing the difference between descendants of slaves from the Americas and the descendants of people who were enslaved in the US. Colin Powell and Kamala Harris are the first without being the second.

In America, Black people as a whole are a distinct cultural group with their own foods, words, holidays, mannerisms, and media. The are in the special case where they don't identify with their ancestral lands because all culture pertaining to that was forcibly stripped away.

White people, at least in America, aren't a group with shared culture. The only thing that really unites them is the color of their skin. White people also tend to have an actual ancestral culture they identify with highly-- usually the culture of a European country their predecessors emigrated from. And as far as I know the vast majority of them don't want to identify as 'white', as they value their ancestral culture more.

So a black person who moved from Africa is then lower-case black, because they are not part of the Black (uppercase) culture?

Potentially; you’ll see lots of Nigerian-Americans and Somali-Americans due to recent immigration, where they know their ancestry.

Not just knowledge, but stronger ties to those places. As generations go by, they may assimilate into the larger Black culture or not.

What on earth, white people in America certainly do share a culture, it’s called American culture. I think and hope that black Americans share the same culture too. Actually I oversimplify slightly because I do see differences in coastal elite vs middle American cultures. The differences between I, a Texan, and someone from California or New York seem far greater than the trivial differences in culture I’ve seen between myself and Texans of _any_ other race, ethnicity, or gender/sexual orientation.

You spend the first part of your comment claiming their is a white culture, and the rest of the comment saying its a transracial American culture. Except for the first half of your sentence, you are exactly correct. White people (and black people) share an American culture. White people often have additional cultural (e.g. Irish-American or Italian-American) with distinct food or holidays or music or whatever. It's those uses that Black culture refers to.

According to AllSides, AP Politics is definitely sided[0], but it doesn't affect the AP outside of the politics section[1]. A lot better than nothing, especially since anyone more centrist would not publish anywhere near the volume of stories.

[0]: https://archive.ph/aqpJM,

[1]: https://archive.ph/1rhNj

Archive since they've merged the ratings for clarification, but haven't actually changed their minds.

Capitalizing "Black" but not "white" seems arguably reasonable for the same reason we have a "Black History Month" but no "White History Month".

We don't have a "White History Month" because white history is the default in the US. In a sense every month is a white history month here. Note that we do have months for some subsets of white, e.g., Irish-American Heritage Month (March).

Same for why we have LGBT Pride month but no straight pride month. Straight is the default.

I've seen outlets start to capitalize "Brown" which confused me.

This is very far down the list of things for me to be outraged about.

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