That's what the Chicago Style Guide recommends, and a lot of outlets use the Chicago Manual to guide their editorial practices.

https://cmosshoptalk.com/2020/06/22/black-and-white-a-matter...

It's a hint that we subconsciously pick up. Because capital letters indicate a group with a name and an identity ("American", "Bavarian"), which strengthens the idea that being black is an identity. There are many more, but if you try to talk about these hints, you will just sound like a crazy person. Any tech-savvy person could probably figure out a way to search the articles of the last 20 years and see how often there are articles in which the words "Black" and "white" appear, in contrast to "black" and "white".

Do you want to know the “answer” or do you want to know the answer?

Not this publication, but most discussions I've seen of this use essentially the same points: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php

> White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.

Just… wow.

This is some next level nonsense.

At the end of the article there's a little note: "This piece has been updated for clarity. An earlier version included an explanation that was off-base". I got curious and looked up the initial version on the Internet Archive, and it was that paragraph that changed in the most drastic way. The original said:

"AT THE COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW, we capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to racial groups. Black is an ethnic designation; white merely describes the skin color of people who can, usually without much difficulty, trace their ethnic origins back to a handful of European countries."

As you've noticed, this became:

"AT THE COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW, we capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms. For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists."

Correct me if I'm wrong but this seems to have just started a few years ago? Suddenly news publications all started capitalizing "Black". Maybe it was to provide parity with ethnic groups named after locations with proper nouns, like Asians, Hispanics, Indians, Pacific Islanders, etc.?

Of course a decade or two ago there was a push towards "African American", which has two capital letters, but that didn't quite catch on.

If White people want to be capitalized, maybe we can call them "Euros"?

Recent yep, but your guess is wrong. A cousin comment linked to a Chicago Style Guide post from around the 2020 riots where they mention it's a recent change other publications have made and they're following suit.

The change is to refer to "the Black identity" instead of race. Whatever that means.

> If White people want to be capitalized, maybe we can call them "Euros"?

I think this would be controversial. While a lot of White Americans are proud of their ethnic background (I'm a quarter Irish!, I'm an Italian American), many are not. Maybe because they have mixed backgrounds, don't know where their ancestors came from, or because their ancestors fought or fled wars with those European ancestors. For instance my great-grandfather left Europe in disgust after WWI, and after coming to America told his family that they were going to be simply Americans.

According to wikipedia, 6.6% of Americans self-identify their ancestral origin as simply "American". Most of these are visibly white. Many of them are descended from British people, and quite possibly don't want to self-describe as British-American because America was founded by a war to terminate that connection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_ancestry

Interesting. I don't have studies but anecdotally many people seem to tie their hyphenated-Americanism to their last name. Of course that just follows one lineage. You could be 60% British, but have an Italian last name, and describe your ancestry as Italian-American.

Mother of god...

This will go away eventually.

not sure but i know it started as a porn thing

That's sort of an antisemitic question.

In what way is that question antisemitic?

Basically most news agencies started doing this after AP pushed it.

https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-910566...

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Black-American, like Irish-American or Italian-American, are seen as a unique, somewhat homogeneous identity and culture. White-American isn't. So they decided not to capitalize it on that basis.