[tptacek]

Nobody has any problem with Irish heritage groups, or Polish, or Italian. "White" isn't a coherent thing; it's defined (malleably) mostly in opposition to "Black", which is the ethnicity created by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, which stripped millions of African people of their original cultural identities.

[d-z-m]

> "White" isn't a coherent thing

Agree completely. I think part of the problem is that "White" and "Black" are overloaded terms. If "White" is used to refer to an ethnicity, it carries the incoherence problems you mention(I would argue the term "Black" has these same problems).

I was trying to use the terms "White" and "Black" to refer to skin color only. I believe this is the usage that an organization like the Harvard BSA[0] is invoking on their website.

[0]: https://www.theharvardbsa.com/

[david-gpu]

> Nobody has any problem with Irish heritage groups, or Polish, or Italian

What about German or Austrian heritage groups?

> "White" isn't a coherent thing

But black, Asian or Latino are? They span whole continents, dozens of countries with radically different cultures.

"White" is synonym with "European heritage". It is just as simple and as complex as any of the other broad categories mentioned earlier. But while it is socially acceptable to create associations for the former, the latter are looked at with such suspicion that only the most radicalized are even willing to join. Similar story with heterosexuals and men.

[kasey_junk]

> What about German or Austrian heritage groups?

No. No one has problems with these. You can find them in droves across broad swaths of any US town. In the Midwest especially they are central to festivals, police clubs, civic organizations and political organizations.

Men’s organizations are similar. Effectively every church in America has men’s clubs that do prayer meetings, prison outreach, homeless support etc. There are men’s clubs for fathers, learning to debate, and driving funny little cars around to help burn victims. There are fraternal organizations on most college campuses. Heck there are still old fashioned private clubs where men can get together to drink whiskey and smoke cigars.

[tptacek]

Yes, Black is. It's overloaded, but in America, it refers unambiguously to the new ethnicity created by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade --- where before you (and, more importantly, your children) were (say) Yoruba, now you were a Black slave. Black people have a numerous and specific shared cultural attributes: language dialects, food, music, religious affiliations. The same isn't true of the varying European ethnicities! Most of what an Irish person and a Slav have in common, an Irish person and a Black person also have in common.

To keep the ambiguity at bay, do what John McWhorter (himself no woke-scold) suggests, and capitalize Black when referring to the African Diasporic people of America, and lowercase it when referring generically to people of African origin, the same way you lowercase "white".