Except one instance when "black" is all lowercase, the article capitalizes the first letter of the word "black" every time and "white" is never capitalized. I wonder why. I'm not trying to make some point either, I genuinely am wondering why.
Black people (specifically this means people in the US who have dark skin and whose ancestry is in the US) have a unique identity based on a shared history that should be dignified in the same way we would write about Irish or Jewish people or culture.
There is no White culture, however, and anyone arguing for an identity based on something so superficial as skin colour is probably a segregationist or a White supremacist. American people who happen to have white skin and are looking for an identity group should choose to be identify as Irish or Armenian or whatever their ancestry justifies, or they should choose to be baseball fans or LGBTQ allies or some other race-blind identity.
If it's comparing a culture vs a 'non-culture' then that doesn't sound like for like.
Lmao, oh the irony reading this on HN in 2025
The cognitive dissonance is really incredible to witness
I would also guess that most people saying that are centrists/moderates cosplaying a different political ideology, making it even harder to see any distinct features or a sense of community and belonging.
Edit: In case you're only paraphrasing a point of view which you don't hold yourself, it would probably be a good idea to use a style that clearly signals this.
The ethnic, cultural, linguistic, familial, etc., identities of enslaved people in America were systematically and deliberately erased. When you strip away those pre-American identities you land on the experience of slavery as your common denominator and root of history. This is fundamentally distinct from, for example, Irish immigration, who kept their community, religion, and family ties both within the US and over the pond. There’s a lot written about this that you can explore independently.
I’m not actually a fan of “Black” in writing like this, mostly because it’s sloppily applied in a ctrl+f for lower case “black”, even at major institutions who should know better, but the case for it is a fairly strong one.
So dark-skinned Africans aren't "Black"? (But they are "black"?)
Why not just use black/white for skin tone, and African-American for "people in the US who have dark skin and whose ancestry is in the US"? Then for African immigrants, we can reference the specific nation of origin, e.g. "Ghanaian-American".
African descendants of slaves in America ("Blacks") are similarly distinct.
Both have undergone their own ethnogensis, which makes them distinct from their original continents (Europe, Africa).
Both are multi-racial ethnos as well (unlike many European and African countries).