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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   42833 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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I feel like the gender identity of criminals is sort of a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't situation. If the NYT uses "preferred" pronouns, then we all point and scream and say they're honoring the criminal. If the NYT makes an exception to its general rules on "preferred" pronouns, then we all point and laugh and say "look, even the NYT doesn't believe that trans women are women, they revoke the status as soon as they commit a crime."

I actually like the capitalization of Black when referring to black people in America. It neatly denotes a cohesive cultural subgroup which otherwise requires a confusing counterintuitive stew of euphemisms: African American mostly worked, but it doesn't include Zohran or Elon even though they are literally from Africa and in America; American Descendants of Slavery was a little more precise, but there's obvious edge cases involving black skinned people who were never enslaved, or non-black people who were in other circumstances. Black neatly captures the group we are talking about when we are talking about them. I don't really think white either is or needs a similar group identification.

It neatly denotes a cohesive cultural subgroup which otherwise requires a confusing counterintuitive stew of euphemisms

By this argument, both capital B Black and capital W White make a lot of sense. Both are new ethnicities divorced from "Old World" roots, some by force and some by choice. Both occupy a strange checkbox of culture and ethnicity. Alas, the NYT style guide doesn't use your much stronger argument.

Black refers to all black people around the world:

Based on those discussions, we’ve decided to adopt the change and start using uppercase “Black” to describe people and cultures of African origin, both in the United States and elsewhere. We believe this style best conveys elements of shared history and identity, and reflects our goal to be respectful of all the people and communities we cover.

Emphasis mine. As far as I'm concerned this is deeply racist and, of course, quietly white supremacist (or slightly more charitable and using progressive language, their argument continues to center the experience and importance of white people behind a mask of false respect for Blackness). Black people in America, in the UK, in Africa, everywhere? Basically all the same, according to Dean Baquet and Phil Corbett.

We will retain lowercase treatment for “white.” While there is an obvious question of parallelism, there has been no comparable movement toward widespread adoption of a new style for “white,” and there is less of a sense that “white” describes a shared culture and history. Moreover, hate groups and white supremacists have long favored the uppercase style, which in itself is reason to avoid it.

White people are just too doggone diverse and unique to have a shared anything. Plus bad people used it, so it's radioactive.

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