Talk:black

Noun and adjective translations combined - these should be separated out. I have started with fr and it — This unsigned comment was added by Paul G (talk • contribs) at 10:55, 12 December 2003 (UTC).Reply

The word "black" have both masculine and feminine forms in Hebrew only when it is an adjective שחורה/שחור (shakhor/shkhora), not when it is a noun. Liso 19:19, 12 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

The translations of BLACK (colour) are an indiscriminate mixture of words that mean BLACK (noun = "blackness"), for example Polish, Czech, and BLACK (adjective) most other languages, but in many. This should be verified an corrected. — This unsigned comment was added by 193.212.171.26 (talk) at 15:18, 11 December 2007 (UTC).Reply

A word that is a certain part of speech may be translated into a different language by a word that is a different part of speech. This is not rare. Depending on the language pair, this phenomenon varies from occasional to almost always. —Stephen 09:10, 9 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

The etymology of the word ends with “More at bleach.” However, the etymology at “bleach” is much shorter and isn’t obviously related. (Other than mentioning vaguely similar-sounding words.) Can anyone clarify? Bogdanb 15:40, 21 March 2010 (UTC)Reply

Apparently "black" and "bleach" are believed to share the same Proto-Indo-European root. See Online Etymology Dictionary. DCDuring TALK 20:26, 8 April 2010 (UTC)Reply

Pejorative words should not be listed as synonyms, but as related terms of "black", since there is an added meaning to them. See how "nigger"'s synonyms are all derogatory, as they should be. --Isa2012 (talk) 05:16, 7 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

The "Related terms" section is for terms related etymologically (per WT:ELE). Pejorative synonyms are synonyms also: if they have the same meaning except that that they are pejorative, then they belong in the "Synonyms" section marked {{qualifier|pejorative}}; if they have a more restricted meaning, then they belong in the "Hyponyms" section. (See WT:NYMS.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 07:13, 7 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

A comment by Equinox about white made me wonder whether our noun section currently covers something like "the black of space". Probably this is intended to be covered by "Part of a thing which is distinguished from the rest by being black"? But then I wonder if that definition should be reworded to be closer to the corresponding definition at white, "Anything that is of the color [X]", or the other way around. Does something have to have other parts which are of a different colour in order to be referred to as "the black"? I doubt it. - -sche (discuss) 08:50, 6 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

We have two broad senses:

• adj. "Of or relating to any of various ethnic groups having dark pigmentation of the skin."
• n. "A person of African, Aborigine, or Maori descent; a dark-skinned person."

These are real (though possibly dated, at least in the US?), though they may need tweaking if light-skinned members of such ethnic groups would still have been considered members of the groups and thus black. (Should it be "...any of various ethnic groups typically having dark pigmentation..."?)
However, we're surprisingly missing what is now the usual sense (in my experience, especially in the US), whereby black refers only to people of African descent (including indirect African descent, like Kamala Harris), including light-skinned black people, whereby other groups like Aborigines and Maoris are not black. Indeed, our entry on the term nigger uses this sense in the definition, when it correctly considers "a black person" and "a member of any typically dark-skinned people" to be separate senses.
How should this sense of black be worded? It's not quite "Of or relating to people of African descent", nor even "...of dark-skinned African descent", because the average Egyptian Arab is not black, a white South African (of however many generations) is not black, and Berbers (even though dark-skinned and African) are not black. Maybe something like "Of or descended from any of various typically dark-skinned ethnic groups of sub-Saharan Africa"? That's a wordy (and still maybe not quite it); can anyone do better? Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster's attempts to cover the use of black to refer to people are even clumsier, IMO. (For example, Dictionary.com has "African American" as a sense, but I can't imagine there's any situation in which only an African American but not a black African would be "black".) - -sche (discuss) 22:00, 17 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

According to Wikipedia there's a long history of the word being applied to Aboriginal Australians. I'm not sure about other dark-skinned ethnic groups, but it bears looking in to. I don't think the addition of typically is really necessary. When we talk about any ethnic group having some trait, I think it's automatically understood that said trait doesn't apply to literally every person in that group. Or, to take a different example, we might say that polar bears are mammals with sharp teeth that live in the far north, even though undoubtedly some polar bears live in zoos in California, and there are maybe some poor senescent ones out there whose teeth are worn down to nubs. Colin M (talk) 05:32, 18 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

• I would recommend that you all get some input/feedback from Black people. We might be able to guide you in questions of blackness. — Dentonius

So I guess with that logic, Black users should only have a say in entries about themselves, Caucasians about themselves, Asians about themselves and so on and so forth until nobody edits anything around here. Of course it is desirable to get as much versatile input as possible from people who know what they're talking about, but that is unfortunately not how the real world works. Minorities are seriously underrepresented in every Wikimedia project. How are we supposed to know the ethnicity, sexual orientation, experience, etc., of any given user in order to decide if they should have a say or not? This is the Internet, as far as I know you could just as well be Chet Hanks living his best life. --Robbie SWE (talk) 19:15, 18 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

• I wanted to add my 2c regarding this, but I saw the n-word again here and realised it's completely pointless. Carry on. — Dentonius 19:21, 18 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

I asked a number of other Black people, and I'm hopeful they'll provide input as to what the definition should be; of course, not every person is or should be expected to be a teacher or a lexicographer, which is why I also asked here where dictionary-editors would respond. :) The feedback I've gotten so far, and books I've found, confirm what I said above and what Colin said about the broad sense being real, and also confirm US use is narrower. The US Census defines Black as "having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa", which is circular but limits it to Africans; recent publications by the US relating to the census will thus use the term this way, and other sources confirm Maoris are Pacific Islanders. This American PBS piece also says that in a US context Black means being, or being descended from, African(s). I also located a scholarly discussion about this:

• 2000, Mark Williams, "Ethnicity and Authenticity", in Comparative Literary Dimensions: Essays in Honor of Melvin J. Friedman, edited by Melvin J. Friedman, Jay L. Halio, Ben Siegel, University of Delaware Press (→ISBN), page 194:

  "Black" means very different things in different places. In America the word black usually means descended from Africa; East Indians are not generally defined as black there. In Britain, however, Asians often designate themselves as black. In New Zealand, Maori radicals sometimes use the world because it points to their difference from the dominant white culture in terms conveniently binary. Even vaguer uses of the word can be seen, such as the expression "Black Irish," which refers to Irish people supposedly descended from Spanish sailors, or " Black Maoris," who are believed by other Maoris to be descended from black sailors who jumped ship in the northern parts of New Zealand in the early contact period.

Is it better to add a separate definition / subsense for US use or explain the different uses in a usage note, or both? (If we don't separate US use, it becomes more important to revise the existing definition, because when we're talking about the application of the word black (“dark”) to skin colour, saying it means "dark-skinned" and just assuming readers will know we don't actually mean that black (“dark”) means "dark-skinned", and will know it actually includes a significant portion of light-skinned people, is...worse than just providing a better definition.) - -sche (discuss) 22:38, 21 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

If someone is described as having ‘black blood’ as a way of saying they’re black or partially of black descent then their blood belongs to them, not the genetic or racial group that they represent, so would we say this is covered by the following sense: ‘# (sometimes capitalized) Belonging to or descended from any of various (African, Aboriginal, etc) ethnic groups which typically have dark pigmentation of the skin.’?

What about if someone goes into a room full of black (by whichever definition) people and says: “It’s very black in here!”? If the room in question isn’t actually owned by a black person or a black organisation then it can’t strictly be said to ‘belong’ to black people, then is this the same sense?

Perhaps I’m being a bit pedantic here though, in which case we should probably add quotations where blood and a room/place is described as being black to our existing sense to cover this? Overlordnat1 (talk) 05:16, 24 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

You could apply both of those examples to basically any adjective related to race, ethnicity, or nationality. The second example could be used with an even wider range of identities. (We could imagine something like "it's very trans in here!".) 70.172.194.25 05:26, 24 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

That’s true, although the definition at ‘trans’ does say ‘or pertaining to such people’, which may be a possible work-around here. Overlordnat1 (talk) 05:55, 24 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

@Overlordnat1 Hmm. I'm not convinced there's an issue with the definition as far as the "black blood" example goes; you could also say someone has "black features" or even outright say google books:"he belongs to the black race" and I would not take belong to mean "be the property of". (Our definitions at belong do need work, though; the first part of sense 2 is "To be part of" but then the usex is "That house belongs to me"? Oof.)
I would also interpret blood as being used similar to how it's used in Walter Scott's "to share the blood of Saxon royalty", which we have as sense 2 of blood rather than sense 1 (though the definition of that sense might also need improvement to expand "family" to include "ancestry"). So I would not interpret the statement "so-and-so has [some] black blood", or "Chinese blood", or "Jewish blood" (etc, since as the IP said any racial or nationality term can be plugged in here) as saying they possess hemoglobin-having liquid that is owned by dark-skinned African people, unless the context were recovering things stolen from Nigeria's national blood bank.

I'm unsure whether "it's very black in here" requires changes to be made; as the IP says, many things can be plugged in there: I can also find e.g. "very lesbian in here", a space or response (etc) can be "very white", or a google:"response was very Russian", etc. I do notice that many other entries like Russian and even white use "of" rather than "belonging to"; would that help?
It is possible to distinguish "a black club" in the sense of one frequented mainly by black people regardless of who owns it (the way Stonewall was a mafia-owned "gay bar") and "a black club" as in "a black-owned club" a la google books:"black-owned businesses", but aren't those just different ways in which something "belongs to" some group? Hmm... yhere are Chinese or Ghanaian or Argentine recipes, Masai clothes and Hopi hairstyles that these groups don't legally "own", and that are still Ghanaian recipes even if I cook them. (Perhaps it is belong that needs the most reworking? I don't actually object to adding "pertaining to", though, unless someone can think of any problems it would introduce.)

- -sche (discuss) 19:17, 24 October 2023 (UTC)Reply