"Black" versus "black"

[alice]

Could someone explain to this non-American how "Black" differs in meaning from "black"?

[zompist]

I assume you're referring to the way news organizations etc. have started calling people Black instead of black.

I suggest googling "capitalizing black" and reading some (more than one) of the explanations from various publications.

[kadmii]

Black is a racial category (e.g. Black Americans, Black British, etc)

black is a color term

[alice]

I assume you're referring to the way news organizations etc. have started calling people Black instead of black.

I suggest googling "capitalizing black" and reading some (more than one) of the explanations from various publications.

Yes, I am. I wish I'd thought of that.

[Linguoboy]

See also: “Deaf” vs “deaf”.

[Moose-tache]

Wait, did people used to use lowercase terms for ethnicities? I can't believe I never noticed that before. I thought it always had to be capitalized, like "Lithuanian."

EDIT: using lowercase "deaf" doesn't strike me as odd, since deaf is an actual property that a person can have, while Black only works as an arbitrary label, i.e. a signifier for something that has nothing to do with being literally the color black. But when saying "The Deaf," the capital makes more sense.

[Travis B.]

I tend to write names referring to races and like as lowercase unless they are derived from a toponym but names referring to ethnicities and nationalities as uppercase, so I write white, black, and deaf, but Asian, Indian, European, Native American, Chinese, Japanese, and so on.

[Linguoboy]

EDIT: using lowercase "deaf" doesn't strike me as odd, since deaf is an actual property that a person can have, while Black only works as an arbitrary label, i.e. a signifier for something that has nothing to do with being literally the color black. But when saying "The Deaf," the capital makes more sense.

"deaf" is an actual property while "Deaf" is a cultural identification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture

[Moose-tache]

EDIT: using lowercase "deaf" doesn't strike me as odd, since deaf is an actual property that a person can have, while Black only works as an arbitrary label, i.e. a signifier for something that has nothing to do with being literally the color black. But when saying "The Deaf," the capital makes more sense.

"deaf" is an actual property while "Deaf" is a cultural identification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture

Right, exactly. I think only the latter sense can apply to ethnic signifiers like Black.