• Saapas@piefed.zip
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    2 days ago

    I would assume most of the time “black” is used in this context same as “white”, as in to refer to a skin colour, not to a culture.

    And can’t people just refer in general to culture of white people collectively and unspecifically, that would also be written as capitalized “White” but would also be strange imo

    • Soup@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Then that assumption is outdated, which is fine as long as, now knowing that, it is appropriately adjusted.

      You can sorta refer to white people in that way but it doesn’t really have the same effect because of things like power dynamics and the fact that we are able to know where we’re from quite easily. For Black people it’s a cultural identity they needed to build nearly from the ground up, for white people it really is just a way to talk about a group of people based on their skin colour and generalized stereotypes. No one is White because they have connections to their more specific history, but many people are Black precisely because they don’t.

      • Saapas@piefed.zip
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        2 days ago

        I get making a separation between reference to skin colour or “race” and culture, but I just feel like it should be consistent. Out of curiosity I checked how Wikipedia handled it and it doesn’t seem like there’s one rule

        Ethno-racial “color labels” may be given capitalized (Black and White) or lowercase (black and white); mixed use (Black, but white) is also acceptable if editors at a particular article find it appropriate.

        A June–December 2020 proposal to capitalize “Black” (only) concluded against that idea, and also considered “Black and White”, and “black and white”, with no consensus to implement a rule requiring either or against mixed use where editors at a particular article believe it’s appropriate. The status quo practice had been that either style was permissible, and this proposal did not overturn that.

        I wonder if it would be acceptable to do “White but black”, I feel like that would seem outright sketchy in a way the opposite doesn’t

        • Soup@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          White but black would just be choosing to capitalize White for all the reasons it’s less deserving of it yet admitting those things can be valid so yea, 100% sketchy.

          I’m not against “Black and White” and “black” is still a valid thing(some guy from Zimbabwe moving elsewhere can be African-American or African-Canadian, for example) but I’m also pretty ok with “Black and white” as well, especially in places where even white immigrants are treated so differently to citizens of colour. Look at how Musk is, on paper, a prime example of an immigrant who really ought to be deported from the US but is, despite being 100% African, treated with all the privilege his skin colour affords him there.

            • Soup@lemmy.world
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              20 hours ago

              A bit of all of it, but yes that most certainly helps. He’s a good public example, but also look at the fact that ICE is not going after anyone who looks like some flavour of white unless that person specifically gets in their way, and neither of the two recent murders had anything to do with immigration.

    • MouldyCat@feddit.uk
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      2 days ago

      I think their focus is America. America’s racial problems are quite unique to America, because slaves were just part of normal life in the US up until slavery was abolished. It was part of the fabric of society in ways that it just wasn’t elsewhere. Even in the UK, where many black people can trace their family trees to slaves in the West Indies, there were never slaves actually held on the island of Great Britain.

      Things like segregated school systems are still very much in living memory in the US. So there are unique issues in America that Americans must heal from before they can really consider such problems in the past.

      • Saapas@piefed.zip
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        2 days ago

        Someone did explain it to me further. But I still… Well I’m not American. I just feel like, better would be to be consistent