Black and White and White and Black

Wokeism has taken over much more than merely academia. It has functioned as a tapeworm, also, in Wall Street, Hollywood, high tech, even the military. This DEI virus has seeped into the very warp and woof of our entire society. It is akin to the Chinese Cultural Revolution. An intellectual pox takes over the populace, does its damage (although happily, much less so here than there, at least so far), and then, hopefully, goes back from whence it came; hell, presumably. The first step in eradicating this attack on civilization is to at least be award of the degree of this malignity.

              Consider several instances which are pervasive even amongst conservatives. They are amongst the least influenced by this pernicious doctrine, but even they have succumbed to some degree. For example, the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, no pinko operation, they, continually use the ill begotten phrase, “Ms.” (This eviscerates the distinction between the married and unmarried state for women, and thus tends in the direction of undermining that precious institution).

              Exhibit “A,” the new kid on the block, constitutes spelling “black” with capital letters (e.g., “Black), when the word applies to people, while refusing to do so for whites. It refers to them in the lower-case format. Why oh why would any sensible person do that? Don’t men (I use this word advisedly) of good will wish to demonstrate commonalities, not divergences between the two races? And, yet, it is the rare periodical that refuses to engage in this deleterious capital letter practice.

              Why is this harmful, even from the perspective of the “progressives?” (They are not progressive; they are regressive!) One of their main motifs is equality, equity, egalitarianism. They complain, often by far from always justifiably, that white and black people are treated unequally, the latter invidiously. They all too often get the short end of the stick. But in this case, that is exactly what they are supporting: treating the two races differently for no rational reason. Had this practice been started by whites, or conservatives, there would have been complaints to the high heavens that this constituted racism.

How do proponents of this capital letter scam defend this initiative? According to the precedent setting Associated Press: “AP’s style is now to capitalize Black in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense, conveying an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa. The lowercase black is a color, not a person. AP style will continue to lowercase the term white in racial, ethnic and cultural senses.”

But anything that can be said about blacks, in this context, can also be said about whites. Both, equally, have a “shared sense of history, identity and community” at least so some degree. There are also internal differences. Whites in Europe diverge in these characteristics from those in North America and Australia, but, then, the same applies to blacks in the US vis a vis Africa. There is not a “dimes worth of difference” between the two races in this regard, certainly not enough to justify such unequal linguistic treatment.

Why do it then? What is the real reason behind this latest scam? Here, one can only speculate. One hypothesis is that as in the case of calling retrogressing countries “developing,” the hope is that the nomenclature has some magical power to change the actual world for the better. Poor countries need all the help they can get, so, maybe, changing their appellation will be of aid to them. Similarly, capitalizing “black” into “Black” will somehow improve the lot of this demographic. One might as well do a rain dance to call forth a change in the weather.

Pegs:

https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-9105661462