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Comment by quesera | Hacker News Reader

> "Black users" isn't about skin color, it's about a group of people who came from US slavery

(I am having trouble phrasing this question to be unambiguously sincere and without intention of provocation, so please bear with me...)

I read your statement above as saying that "Black" means "descended from US chattel slavery".

Is that your intention? Is this a big-B vs small-b distinction? What are [Bb]lack users called if they are not descended from slavery, or not from US slavery?

Please assume ignorance and not malice. I really do not know what I don't know here.

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What are [Bb]lack users called if they are not descended from slavery, or not from US slavery?

Africans? (in Africa at least)

I haven't heard anyone here around me calling anyone "black"

I haven't heard anyone here around me calling anyone "black"

Wait.

What?

Where are you that you've never heard anyone call a black person, well, "black"?

At a guess, Nigeria, Benin, Mali, Gambia, etc.

As a function of language (black being an English word) and of fish not calling other fish wet.

Various EU countries are also a possibility, not all countries make such a deal of pigmentation as does the US | UK, etc.

I'm familiar with all those nations. (In fact the ECOWAS nations are the ones I'm most familiar with.)

Every one of them, I've heard people calling black people "black".

I've also been all over Western Europe, and it's the same story. I've definitely heard the people in Paris, München, wherever call black people "black".

I thought the answer would be someplace I haven't been. Like maybe parts of Asia outside of Japan and China?

Maybe Eastern European nations use a different term?

Or maybe other parts of Africa? (SADC nations maybe?)

But they definitely call black people "black" in the Gambia and Nigeria.

I've also worked in a good many of the non G20 countries across the planet (geophysical field work) and while, yes, of course skin colour is referred to everywhere it's noticeably less frequent in many countries - I took the stance that the GP was commenting on a relative frequency as compared to (say) the US.

In my experience, which may differ to yours, it was as common in Benin to refer to someone as black as it was in Zurich to call another white.

Thank you. Suggesting that people never used the the term black would imply that I can overhear every conversation. So obviously I can't rule out that the term is used. I just haven't heard it. or, to be fair, I don't remember having heard it. The fact that English is not the majority language in most places is obviously also a factor. And maybe I just haven't been talking to people enough yet.

OK I didn't fully qualify the question, but I was definitely not asking about African people, unless that's the context that was omitted from the original statement.

> I really do not know what I don't know here.

Given they said "this is another case of liberal whites pretending to represent black people in some way in order to manipulate other white people", they don't know anything either.

Assume that the answer to your question is “Yes”.

No other term has had the cultural staying power with regards to identifying the descendants of African slaves in the US (and the earliest generation of immigrants from elsewhere; namely the Caribbean) as a distinct ethnic/cultural group.

Of course the term “Black” can be applied to other ethnicities in general, but in the context of US history, descendants of African slaves make up the primary demographic.

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