Also, anyone know if there a reason why "Black" is capitalized in the paper but "white" is not?
While its not my personal preferred style, the NY Times has recently adopted this style (from an earlier one which capitalized neither) and explains it reasonably well (and other explanations of users of the style have generally been similar, so its what I take as, in outline, the usual explanation):
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black...
Thanks, and yikes, I had no idea this was a thing. So if I wrote "White" in the same way some might write "Black", people might get the wrong idea? To be honest, this change just seems like more petty ways to divide us.
There is no “like no one else does”; the argument is that Black identity (particularly in America) is essentially an ethnic identity produced by shared experience, the same as other ethnic identities. The distinctive part is that the shared experience centrally includes American White supremacy which, among other things, actively erased the preexisting ethnic identities of the black people whom it made Black.
If you look at it from a people perspective, it doesn't make sense because people want to be their own individual, not lumped into a category because everyone experiences things differently. I see this as an artificial construction that is usually argued against.
There are certainly similarities, but then, no one denies that “Jewish” is a national/ethnic/cultural identifier that should be capitalized, even if racial or physically descriptive identifiers generally shouldn't and even if “Jewish” might also be considered a racial identifier.
There are arguably even closer similiarities with the various peoples with roots in the pre-Columbian population of the Americas. But, again, whatever label is used for various collections of those people, one rarely sees arguments against capitalizing the label chosen.
Identities are arbitrary, but they aren't ethnic unless they are rooted in an ethnicity, which is a shared culture.
Because, the best cure for perceived systemic racism is _actual_ systemic racism. It's all absurd.
What is sad is when people hide in the shelter of group identity, instead of being responsible for their own speech and actions. It's often not in anyone's best interests, and distracts from clarity.
Slavery, oppression, and loss are not the only ways in which a shared culture can be formed.
No, that they share an identity forged in the experience of slavery and the discriminatory laws afterward, and in many cases that's all the ethnic identity they have because their ancestors preexisting cultural heritage and identity was forcefully prevented from being preserved.
[0] https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php
For example, some of the first names are "Lashonda", "Lakeisha", "Takwanda" in the "Black" list, whereas the "white" list includes names like "Geoffrey", "Kristen", "Jennifer". If the perceived social status of the names isn't matched, that could invalidate their results.
As a follow-up, it would be interesting to do a survey on the perceived social status of each of the names they used to see how that might have influenced the results.
What I'm saying is that even if that were true, unless you're saying only "objectively" Black and White people are to judge the social status of Black and White names (such that each race judges their own name) - it would end up being no different than the exercise in the paper.
For example:
Let's say Denise is an "high status" Black name and LeShawn is a "low status" Black name. "Billy" is low status White and "Alexander" is high status.
Even if you knew this you'd need to know how the other race perceives the name since that's ultimately what's being judged here, hence it would be moot.
And that could be done through research surveys to account for that variable in this research.
Perhaps if Black people and White people had a "pure" view of other Blacks and Whites, unaffected by history you could do what you're saying.
Another example, to split racism from classism but with the confounding variable of national origin: "Lashonda Brown" vs "Abena Nwachukwu" (this is an actual last name that I Googled). On the resume, both could be given membership in a "Women's Society of Some University" to indicate gender, and same for other characteristics.
Edit: Note that even the SPELLING of "Geoffrey" vs "Jeffrey" vs "Jeff" may indicate something about social class or background.
Random source, I didn't keep all my tabs open: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-elites-top-50-baby-names
In other words, you're trying to separate racism from classism, but race and class are already inexorably linked to begin with. Any perception of class to the name would already be influenced by historical racism, for better or for worse.
And Black is capitalized for the reason Swedish is capitalized.
In other words, if a "white name" is as unique as a black name, does it receive the same amount of bias, or different?