Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

This is racist pseudoscience

https://twitter.com/CJR/status/1273011468728807424

The word "ethnic" means "relating to a population subgroup... with a common national or cultural tradition"

The notion that the people we call "black" or "Black" are more part of a common national or cultural tradition is obviously wrong, in both sense of the term "wrong."

We are a single race — the human race

There is great cultural and genetic diversity among people we call "white" "brown" "black" "Asian" etc

The notion that "Black is an ethnic designation" and "white merely describes the skin color" is howlingly wrong

I can't believe that any of this has to be said

What @cjr and other publications are engaging in is racist essentialism that has been thoroughly debunked and denounced for hundreds of years

Apparently, it must be denounced again

And it must be actively refused and resisted

"The biggest complicating factor for news organizations is whether descriptions of white or brown people should also be capitalized."

apnews.com/a6176d23ae0172…

This is totally bonkers:

"A description of a person as 'white' generally doesn’t carry cultural connotations. There’s also some concern that a capitalized 'white' has associations in some minds with white nationalist or supremacist movements, said @PaulaFroke AP’s editor"

"A description of a person as 'white' generally doesn't carry cultural connotations?"

Excuse me? So African-Americans (see what I did there) "carry more cultural connotations" than whites?

Seriously? Black folks have culture and whites don't? Is this still the year 2020?

Wait, it gets better

“We look at it from an objective point of view of how language has evolved,” @PaulaFroke said

Wow, just wow. So apparently AP has done an "objective" analysis of how the language has evolved and determined "white" means "without cultural connotations"?

You couldn't — or at least shouldn't be able to — pass an Anthropology 101 class at any college or university repeating the nonsense claimed by @PaulaFroke @CJR and anyone else promoting such racism

This is horrifying. Truly, truly horrifying.

Black, brown, and white all refer to skin color, not national or ethnic groups

Asian American, African American, Italian American, Swiss American — those are our national and ethnic identifiers

Racism is immoral and must be actively resisted

I refuse to participate in this racist attempt to destroy the English language through the use of pseudoscience

Chicago Manual of Style says “Names of ethnic and national groups are capitalized”

Thus, "African American," "Asian American," "Italian American" are all fine

It also says we should write "black" and "white" in lowercase

Why should we change that now, exactly?

Mike Laws from @CJR says we should ignore Chicago and instead listen to "writers of color and to alternative stylebooks"

First, why?

Second, *which* "writers of color," exactly?

@wesyang and @thomaschattwill
are "writers of color" and they disagree with @CJR

So now what?

Should there be a vote among "writers of color"?

Or should Mike Laws & @CJR staff just pick the "writers of color" they happen to agree with?

None of this makes any sense whatsoever

Laws says a colleague told him, “I view the term Black as a recognition of ethnic identity...and is more accurate than African American, which suggests recent ties to the continent) and is also transnational and inclusive of our Caribbean [and] Central/South American siblings"

First, African American *has never in the history of its use* suggested recent ties to the continent. The term was proposed in 1989 as a replacement of "black."

How in the world could people have imagined it suggested "recent ties" to Africa?

The claim that "African American" was somehow more exclusionary than Black is similarly wrong

Anyone who has spent any time in Latin American knows that many of them think of themselves as Americans and insist on calling us "North Americans" so as to not cede "American" to us.

Later in the article she says she wants to capitalize black to "acknowledge that slavery 'deliberately stripped' people forcibly shipped overseas “'of all other ethnic/national ties.'”

But it does the opposite, which is why Jackson advocated using "African American"!

Exactly.

@CJR is repeating a racist ideology invented in Europe:

https://twitter.com/sankrant/status/1273037349677645826

@CJR Thank you

https://twitter.com/KendraWrites/status/1273246651633881089