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For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business

(www.bloomberg.com)
677 points saeedjabbar | 5 comments | 16 Jun 20 15:19 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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JumpCrisscross ◴[16 Jun 20 21:10 UTC] No.23544162[source]▶
Stylistic question. I noticed Black and White capitalized in this article. Is that an emerging convention?
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stevenbedrick ◴[16 Jun 20 21:19 UTC] No.23544304[source]▶
It's a really interesting story, actually! The question of whether and when to capitalize has been an active one since at least the early 20th century. Here's a (very) recent Columbia Journalism Review article that discusses it from a stylistic perspective:

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php

And I also thought that this article, about the Brookings Institution's decision to capitalize Black in their reports, had some interesting historical context:

https://www.brookings.edu/research/brookingscapitalizesblack...

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1. neonate ◴[16 Jun 20 21:27 UTC] No.23544414[source]▶
Capitalizing White seems extremely weird, though, and somehow emblematic of how we're sliding backwards into a racialized consciousness even while trying (and hopefully succeeding) to step forwards toward equality.
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2. erik_seaberg ◴[16 Jun 20 21:40 UTC] No.23544567[source]▶
This. The words "white" and "black" are not proper names of places, and they aren't honorifics. To say I'm "White" would be like saying I'm "Fat" or "Tired".
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3. neonate ◴[16 Jun 20 21:44 UTC] No.23544613[source]▶
I'm not sure that argument works grammatically because we capitalize things that aren't names of places, but I agree with you in the sense that it's the feeling I got while reading the article, and it was strangely creepy.
4. pessimizer ◴[16 Jun 20 22:43 UTC] No.23545206[source]▶
But they're also not physical qualities, they're ethnic classifications. I don't know any others that aren't capitalized.

People aren't actually colored black or white, and you can have the same coloring as a person who is black or white ane be neither black or white.

I'm not a big fan of the capitalization, but it's reasonable. Are "Aboriginal" or "Indigenous" place names or honorifics?

5. azernik ◴[17 Jun 20 10:10 UTC] No.23549729[source]▶
In the American context, they are proper names of ethnic groups.