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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

It's a complicated matter and I'm not the right person to make any statements about it, but on the one side, we have white sub-groups like Irish or Italian. On the other, grouping all Black sub-groups under one moniker seems overly abstract as well. That said, it works for the debate of racism etc in the US, which affects people of color, not so much the various white groups.

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> have white sub-groups like Irish or Italian

Right, but are those sub-groups still all that relevant in the context of race in America?

It's been a long time since Irish-Americans have been treated differently than British-Americans, for example.

I would say grouping all white sub-groups together makes as much sense as grouping all black or Asian sub-groups together because generally racial dynamics today are viewed as occurring between White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American groups. Further granularity is rarely considered in informal language.

It's also due to the unique conditions under which the Black identity was formed - that is forced colocation, separation from history, and systemic coidentification. Anyone who traces their history back to slavery, which many Black Americans can, basically has to stop there creating one pretty large "sub-group".

There's a case to be made - and some theorists do - that black and Black are different identities in America, the second directly corresponding to that shared loss of history.

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