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In Tony Thomas's recent, trenchant post on race, class, blues performers, and audiences is the sentence: "This is an exaggeration from afar, perhaps, because while more white people are involved on all sides of the post-folk blues culture than Black people, this is hardly something that involves a major segment of the white population." That capitalization bothers me. It is a stylistic quirk of Tony's, used only among colleagues, but I think it merits discussing. If not here, where? It's commonly accepted that we capitalize African-American and European-American, both awkward conflations of multiple cultures into single continents. What other ways do we speak about class and race? Two words we capitalize are Caucasian and Negro. (The latter term was common to both Martin Luther King and W.E.B. Du Bois). But nobody ever uses "Caucasian" in regular speech. As to "Negro", _The Free Dictionary_ says the word is "often offensive." And since African-American is stilted, the default word has become black. Or Black. There is no common term for white people because the majority of English speakers *are* white people. So are black and white legitimate ethnic groups? If so, wouldn't we want to write "Black" and "White"? What about cultures? If there is a legitimate capitalization, wouldn't we want to parallel "Black culture" with "White culture"? I also think the capitalization of words like Blues and Jazz and Hip-Hop and Reggae and Klezmer and even Country, are a mistake. If a term is important enough culturally it doesn't *need* the flattery of being capitalized. "R&B" is capitalized only because it was easier than "rhythm and blues". In instances where meaning is ambiguous, we can capitalize Soul or Country, but genres have never gotten capitalized: opera not Opera, symphony not Symphony, honky-tonk not Honky-tonk. Capitalizing niches seems to be promotional rather than scholarly: Classical, Folk, Bluegrass, Funk. I think scholarly writing needs to examine this. What do we mean when we capitalize (or fail to) these words? Capitalization in English is also a show of respect or an attempt to confer dignity or greater importance to the subject. Could this be behind some capitalizations? So how do you use them, and if you treat them differently, why? Black and White black and white black and White Black and white Joseph Byrd College of the Redwoods
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