this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
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Writing races/skin colour with a capitalized letter seems strange when it doesn't include a continent name
Black, with a capital, is a culture. It’s fairly old news at this point, but the point is that it’s because of the shared experience and lack of ancestral knowledge of those people becaus of things like the slave trade and ongoing, systemic racism. They don’t get to say “African” because they were completely cut off from that culture, which is already such a wrong thing to say because “Africa” is not a single place nor a single culture, nor even only a dozen places with a few dozen cultures(it’s a helluva lot more). Besides, after developing their own strong cultures, Haitian or Jamaican immigrants are far more from there than from anywhere in Africa.
“White” is not a culture. White people will very often tell you where their family is from, to the city, without even being asked and if you don’t know you can even just look at the last name they were able to keep when their ancestors arrived in North America. White people have the privilege to not be lumped together in our society and being referred to by their country in Europe far more often than by simply “European” while Black people will just get a useless “African” tacked in front of their country of residence’s name.
Calling them "white people" does lump them together. There's a fascinating history about how different ethnic groups got absorbed and assimilated into whiteness. You aren't supposed to look into your family's roots in Europe. That's woke nonsense! Just shut up, drink your beer, grill your steaks, watch football. You're white now.
BTW, I have heard people referred to as European-American. If your ancestors came from, say, Ireland, England, Spain, and Italy, you could call yourself an Irish-English-Spanish-Italian-American, but European-American is much easier to say.
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
Then that assumption is outdated, which is fine as long as, now knowing that, it is appropriately adjusted.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.
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
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
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.
I think his privilege is more his immense wealth than his skin colour
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.
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.
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
It's also interesting when the New York Times writes an uppercase Black but a lowercase white in the same article.
because Black refers to a specific cultural group while white doesn't (that'd be Irish-American or whatever)
Jeez. I'm sure it is something where their heart is in the right place but just comes off as sketchy to me