My black African ex once chewed out an American who not only called her African American but "corrected her" after she referred to herself as black, in a very clear British received pronunciation accent that has no hint of American to it, by insisting it was "African American".
This reminds me of a YouTube video from a black female from the US, where she argued that Montenegro sounds too racist. Yet, that name existed way before the US was conceived.
Wow. I've been corrected on my English (as an Englishman, living in England, speaking English) by an American before. But to be corrected of your race is something else
Did they complain you didn't speak with the correct English accent too?
I always find it hilarious when Americans talk about English accents and seem to think there are one - or maybe two if they've seen any period movies or Mary Poppins -, given there are several clearly distinct English accents in use in my London borough alone (ignoring accents with immigrant origin, which would add many more)
I support them in their fight against how you guys pronounce certain things compared to how it is spelled. I'm not from the US though but Worcestershire sauce....come on.
That's fine, but that means I reserve the right to go to Detroit and insist it's pronounced "de-twa" and tell the locals they say it wrong because it has a french origin :)
I'm not black, so I can't speak for black people in the UK.
But in terms of English language rather than their preference, I think you use a compound term, such as Black British, it's probably more correct to capitalize, at least if you intend it to be a compound rather than intend black as "just" an adjective that happens to be used to qualify British rather than referring to a specific group. "Black" by itself would not generally be capitalized unless at the start of a sentence any more than "white" would. And this seems to be generally reflected in how I see the term used in the UK.
I think it’s just that’s the word you’ve been taught to use. It’s divorced from the meaning of its constituent parts, you aren’t saying “an American of African descent” you’re saying “black” but in what was supposed to be some kind of politically correct way.
I cannot imagine even the most daft American using it in the UK and intending that the person is actually American.
I promise it's not because we think of people outside the US as American. When I was a kid in the 2000s, we were told never to say "black" and to say "African-American" instead. There was no PC term in the US to refer to black people who are not American. This has started to change lately, but it's still iffy.
Besides that, many Americans (including myself) are self-centered in other ways. Yes I like our imperial units better than the metric system, no I don't care that they're called "customary units" outside the US, etc.
The day after I left Oslo after Christmas, it hit -20F. 0F is peanuts. I've also experienced above 100F several times. In the US, incidentally. It may be a perceptual system, but it's not very perceptive, and very culturally and geographically limited.
(incidentally I also have far more use for freezing point and boiling point of water, but I don't think it makes a big difference for celsius that those happen to be 0 and 100 either)
I grew up in a place where it'd get above 100F and below 0F pretty much every year.
But I will say, F is pretty decent still, even if the GP statement is a bit off:
100F is getting uncomfortably hot for a human. You gotta worry about heat stroke and stuff.
0F is getting uncomfortably cold for a human. You gotta worry about frostbite and dying from the cold if underdressed.
In the middle, you'll probably live. Get locked out of the house taking out the trash when it's 15F? You're probably okay until you find a neighbor. Get locked out of the house taking out the trash when it's -15F? You have a moment of mental sheer panic where you realize you might be getting frostbite and require medical attention if you don't get inside in like <10 minutes.
80F is uncomfortably hot for me unless I strip off; that's when my aircon goes on. And 55F is uncomfortably cold...
I think basically all of these are rationalisation (and that goes for the celsius numbers too). They don't matter. You learn very early which numbers you actually care about, and they're pretty much never going to be 0 or 100 on either scale.
You're not going to be thinking about whether it's 0 outside or not if locked out; just whether or not you're freezing cold or not.
It's not the bookends themselves that's the issue, it's the coarseness. Celsius is too coarse because it's extrapolated from 0-freezing and 100-boiling points. People can generally feel the difference between 1˚F increments, and roughly two make up 1˚C diff. Also, you can't really say "in the 70s" etc with Celsius. I watch a foreign weather report and that entire country is in the 20s ˚C for an entire week.
It's a minor difference either way, but I'm not going to switch to something slightly worse.
In my 48 years of using Celsius I can safely say I have never cared about smaller increments of celsius than 1. You're not keeping a room stable with that precision, for example, nor will the temperature at any given specific location outside be within that precision of your weather reports. Or anywhere close. And we can, and do, say "low 20's" "high 20s', "low 30's" etc. which serves the same effect. It's again, never in my 48 years mattered.
Either system is only "worse" when you're not used to it. It makes no practical difference other than when people try to argue for or against either system online.
The only real reason to consider switching would be that it's a pointless difference that creates minor friction in trade, but there too it's hardly a big deal given how small the effect is and how long it'd likely take to "pay for itself" in any kind of way, if ever.
You might not tell the difference, but evidently enough people can that digital thermostats commonly add 0.5 increments when switching into ˚C mode. And when they don't, some people put them into ˚F mode just for the extra precision.
I'm sure some do. And that more think they do. I still don't buy that the difference affects their lives in any meaningful way. My thermostat, btw. has 0.1 increments.
It does not matter, because when the heating is on the difference between the temperature measured at ground, at ceiling, at the edges or at the centre of the room will easily be a couple of degrees or more apart depending on just how significant the temperature differential is with the outside. Have measured, as part of figuring out how the hell to get to within even 3-4 degrees of the same temperature at different places in the same open living areas.
Very few people live in houses that are insulated well enough and with good enough temperature control that they have anything close to that level of precision control over the temperature in their house.
But if it makes them feel better to think they do, then, hey, they can get my kind of thermostats. At last count there are now 5 thermostats on different heating options in my living room, all with 0.1C steps.
People don't generally need to communicate the difference between 20C and 20.6C (68F and 69F) unless measuring it directly, in which case you would use the exact decimal number.
I also don't think most people can tell the difference between 68F and 69F unless they are experiencing them very close between, and the perceived heat at that precision is dependent on a lot more than just the measured heat.
I don't get why saying "in the 70s" is better than saying "around 24" besides being used to one way or the other.
Fahrenheit is not better and for any scientific/engineering/proper measurement you would use celsius or kelvin (which shares a scale with celsius but with a different zero-point) anyway, so why keep fahrenheit? Unless for purely traditional or cultural reasons.
We tend to be much better at noticing temperature changes than fixed temperatures anyway, and more likely to reach to feeling that we're getting warmer or colder, than the specific temperature differential causing it. I think a lot of the people who think they feel differences at that precision really are feeling the difference of their heating/cooling turning on or off at different intervals. As I noted in another comment, having spent time trying to figure out how to make all of my living room - which isn't that big - comfortable at the same time, the difference is often huge, even with thermostats with 0.1 steps, because when the thermostats triggers, it's not like it will precisely lift the temperature at its measured zone by 0.1 steps. It will either heat my underfloor heating or my radiators to a point where they will first hit a 0.1 increase, plus the margin before it triggers the other direction again, at which point they'll get turned off, and significantly overshoot while the floor or radiator cools down. Setting a thermostat to 24.3 is not going to leave you with a room at 24.3, it's going to leave you with a room fluctuating between something like 22 and 26 in different places and heights and time intervals...
The only time I'll buy that anyone manages that level of precision is if they live in a very modern house with near perfect insulation where the heating or cooling input needed to keep it in balance is near nothing.
It's more achievable in a small single-story apartment, or better yet, a car. I can really feel the difference without looking at the number. There's also what you said about the trigger points, but it's still a good reason to have precision on a thermostat. I felt like it was slightly too cold yesterday, so I moved the thermostat up 1˚F and it felt warm enough.
And I'm not a scientist, but in science classes we were only using Kelvin, not Celsius. C and F aren't useful for proportions because 0 isn't 0. Even Rankine would be fine, just use different constants.
For those unaware, degrees Rankine are the same size as degrees Fahrenheit, but counting from absolute zero. It’s the English analogue to the French system’s Kelvin.
Lmao my thermostat in Germany was in Fahrenheit because the previous occupant disliked the inaccuracy of Celsius since the """software""" allowed the room to get colder before kicking in while in C.
That’s kind of funny. Chinese and Taiwanese transplants call natural born Americans, whether black, white or latin, “foreigners” when speaking in Chinese dialects even while they live in America.
Oh, your husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend is a “foreigner”, ma?
It's both a particle and a question mark word. [Ta]是外國人嗎?
This is how the question would be asked in the mainland or in the regional diaspora of Chinese speakers where foreigners are few. Where foreigner often is a substitute for the most prevalent non-regional foreigner (i.e. it's not typically used for Malaysian or Thai nationals in China) So for those who come over state-side they don't modify the phrase, they keep using foreigner [外國人] for any non-Asian, even when those "foreigners" are natural born.
They clearly knew that, but was joking about the dual meaning of the question mark and mā as in 妈/mother, which is ambiguous when written out in an English comment where it's not a given why there isn't a tone mark (or whether or not they intent the English 'ma', for that matter).
Well, they're as "African" as "African Americans" are... OTOH, Elon Musk is a literal African American (as would be an Arab immigrant to the US from Egypt or Morocco), but can't be called that. So let's admit that such group labels are pretty messed up in general.
>as would be an Arab immigrant to the US from Egypt
If you want to get *very* technical then it's possible to not be African if you're from Egypt: "Egypt is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and the Sinai Peninsula in the southwest corner of Asia."
Depends. Usually black if you don't know any more. Black British if you know they are British, but a lot of black people here are born in Africa or the Caribbean, and not all will be pleased to be described as British (some will take active offense, given Britains colonial past) and will prefer you to use their country or African/Caribbean depending on context.
My ex would probably grudgingly accept black British, but would describe herself as black, Nigerian, or African, despite also having British citizenship.
If you're considering how to describe someone who is present, then presumably you have a good reason and can explain the reason and ask what they prefer. If you're describing someone by appearance, 'black' is the safest most places in the UK unless you already know what they prefer.
Are extremely dark-skinned people (for example from South India) who move to england called "Black"? I've never heard that and would be surprised but i'm curious.
The term African-American does not imply that one was born in Africa. It refers to Americans of African ethnicity (which includes Carribean-Americans of African descent). Chris Rock, Lebron James, and Michael Jordan are all African-Americans born in the US.
Elon Musk is not considered African-American according to the popular usage of the term as he is of European descent despite being born in South Africa.
There's an implicit assumption in it, that while I think it might well not have been trying to be offensive can be seen to suggests a black person in the UK would be African.
Not only do many of them not see themselves as such because they're born here, and their parents and grandparents might be British and/or born here (my son is mixed, his grandfather on his mothers side was Nigerian and British and born here; he is third generation British by some measure - his mother was born in Nigeria, but holds British citizenship due to her father; if he decides to consider himself African or Nigerian - he has a Nigerian citizenship - that's up to him, but he's born here, to a mother with a British citizenship, and has never set foot in any part of Africa), but another significant proportion of black people here consider themselves Caribbean rather than African, because their ancestry goes back many generations in the Caribbean, and that's where they or their recent ancestors immigrated from.
Here, "forcing" a categorization of "African" on someone will be seen by at least some people as implying they're immigrants, and even when that is actually the case, having the label forced on you is often a prelude to racist sentiments.
That all makes sense, but in this case I didn't read any ill intent. All I read was an American asking a categorization question. The immigration status was not relevant to 'African British'. It was simply a byproduct of 1990s/2000s culture where, in the US, "black" was not a term you could use without inferring racism. Rather folks were taught to use "African American" to mitigate racisim claims.
The other comment from hot_gil sums it up well,
"""
I promise it's not because we think of people outside the US as American. When I was a kid in the 2000s, we were told never to say "black" and to say "African-American" instead. There was no PC term in the US to refer to black people who are not American. This has started to change lately, but it's still iffy.
"""
There has been very vocal pressure to understand "lived experiences". This, to me, qualifies exactly as that and is purely a misinterpretation of the author's intent.
I figured that might be the case, and why I tried to thread softly with the first line of my reply. In Europe in general, the "where are you really from?" line of questioning is one most non-white (and quite a lot of white) people will run into, and while it is often used to obscure racism, anti-immigrant sentiment a bigger part of the discussion because it is often the "first layer" of a package that will turn out to include racism once you've peeled back the anti-immigration (not always - there are people who have anti-immigrant views who are not racist - the link, I think, rather goes the other direction: most of the racists are also anti-immigrant and uses it as a marginally more 'acceptable' shield against accusations of racism)
Hence for many people it becomes important to de-emphasize "another location" in how they identify that might imply they somehow don't belong. While for others holding on to a culture that is often a lot closer matters.
And so the discourse around labels is very different.
Thank you for the insight. It's really interesting to see the Euro perspective. Moreso considering how I would believe immigration is more common after the establishment of the EU. But I suppose you do have relatively recent major conflicts which may cause resistance to outsiders.
As an aside, I once was considering trying to spend some working years in Scandinavia but read that it was likely I would always be kept at an arm's length by the locals since I was non native, regardless of my fluency in the language. As an American, I found it odd considering how heterogenous my social circle was. Maybe totally false or not applicable to urban centers, but I read it from various sources, and it was persuasive enough for me to switch focus to mainland Europe.
For Scandinavia and the rest of the Nordics natives get kept at arms length too. Not going to play down the presence of xenophobia as well, but really the Nordic countries can seem very cold on the surface because nobody let you get close until there is a socially sanctioned reason to.
To the point there are books about how to befriend us [1]. There's also this meme[2] of Finns always spacing out at bus stops to avoid invading each other's personal space, for example, but while Finland is perhaps on one extreme of that, Scandinavia as well is close. Denmark maybe a little bit less and in Norway and Sweden.
The way around that tends to be shared activities. E.g. joining a class, going out with colleagues, or joining various groups, or getting drunk, where you then have a socially sanctioned reason for talking to people, and people build from that. People who are used to being able to start friendships with just random encounters will often find that frustrating and hard to navigate and wonder why they're blanked or ignored or actively rebuffed when trying to be friendly - it's not you, or where you're from (most of the time), it's that talking to a stranger makes a lot of people instantly wonder what fresh hell this is. It's not that random encounters etc. never lead anywhere in Scandinavia, but it's rarer. If you move to any of the Nordic countries and don't know or pick on that you will have a bad time. Unless you're a massive introvert - then it's awesome.
For someone who is used to expecting American levels of just randomly talking to people (having been on the receiving ends of that many times when visiting the US: I could never get used to that...), getting used to that might be hard, and basically the further South you go in Europe the less you deal with that.
Why is it so offensive? Why not just let the speaker know they weren't American and move on?
The instant escalation to violence seems like part of the problem generally in today's society, which extends to non racial topics like politics, gender fluidity, etc.
A more appropriate reponse would be something like, "Why do you think I'm American?" A simple question like that would likely be sufficient to get the original speaker to think abkut and reorient their world view, and there was good-faith discussion the entire way.
My Black friend isn't African. That's why. They don't give a shit about being called American, they give a shit about being assumed about being African because they are black.
Elon Musk is not considered African-American according to the popular usage of the term as he is of European descent despite being born in South Africa. Lebron James is a real African-American.
It's an incredibly self-centered view of the world