Same reason you sometimes capitalize deaf/Deaf. They are different words.
Comment on Do black people actually want to be called Black with capital B?
Analog@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Dunno why you’d capitalize black unless it was at the start of a sentence. No one capitalizes white.
Even if you’re in America not all black people are African Americans. Black ppl come from all over the world. (Duh.)
Stupid designations about something that doesn’t matter, but they’re the best we’ve got.
jerkface@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This was a decision that I think the NY Times made to start capitalizing, and I’ve never understood why, but editors of books and articles all use it now, I saw it in a Stephen King story recently.
Language does change, a book by the trans writer Jennifer Finney Boylan about her own transition published in 2001 used transgendered through the book simply because that’s what was used then, and now it’s proper to say transgender; Jenny’s book was released for an anniversary edition and she addressed that in the foreword, that she had left it as written but with some hesitation that people would be offended, which I think would be silly because it was never a slur, it simply was the language then, and before that trans people were called transsexual, and that also wasn’t a slur. So terminology can and does evolve, but it’s just so random in the case of capitalization and nobody has ever explained why.