The logic of capitalizing the B in black but not the W in white—it simply doesn’t hold. The idea that white does not describe a shared cultural history, but that somehow black does—when describing people of African heritage in the US *and elsewhere*—just doesn’t make sense.
Say you just want to do it and that’s it. But don’t say there’s a logical difference.
For example, there are white Hispanics and black Hispanics; there are white Jews and black Jews. ADOS is a term at least thar tries to describe a specific group of people who descend from Southern US slaves. Those people are not the same as Nigerian immigrants. This is clear.
The idea that whiteness is too diffuse to describe a shared cultural history...okay—then why do we talk about it that way when we’re talking about a shared ethnic privilege capacious enough to include WASPs from the Mayflower and Robin DiAngelo, descendant of Italian immigrants?
I think the term ADOS is much better than “black” because it describes a specific group of people in a specific geographic space over a specific period of time and doesn’t rely on the hocus pocus of blood and skin.
If Black were only used in reference to ADOS, that would at least make sense, in the same way that, say, you could imagine making the argument that White should only be applicable to WASPs.
There are 371 tribes in Nigeria alone. How can even all the various immigrants from Nigeria, from Igbo to Yoruba, be said to constitute a single ethnicity? Let alone belong to the same ethnicity as tenth-generation descendants of Mississippi sharecroppers.
