Capitalized to follow the usual capitalization patterns for ethnic groups (compare e.g. Hispanic, Arab), and also, perhaps, as a way to explicitly distinguish it from the color sense, which is not capitalized outside proper nouns.
Meanings
(alt-of, not-comparable) Alternative letter-case form of black (“of or relating to any of various ethnic groups having dark pigmentation of the skin”).
Buried among the jargon of the announcement was a mention of a name for AAVE, suggested by a Black scholar in 1975^([sic]) but never adopted by linguists: Ebonics. That word, concocted from ebony (a color term from the name of a dark-colored wood) and phonics (the name of a method for teaching reading), was destined to attach to the board as if chiseled into a block of granite and hung round their necks. 1999, Geoffrey K. Pullum, “African American Vernacular English Is Not Standard English with Mistakes”, in Rebecca S. Wheeler, editor, The Workings of Language, →ISBN, page 40:
Hundreds of Seattle protesters came together Saturday to voice the sadness and fury that has spread across the country over the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died after being pinned beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer for almost nine minutes. 2020 May 31, “Violence, destruction mar Seattle protests over the death of George Floyd”, in The Seattle Times, archived from the original on 18 Aug 2020, page A1:
By 2016, however, a divide that started appearing in the preceding few years came into full relief—that year, 29% of nonwhite liberals (28% of nonwhite Democrats) and 38% of Black liberals (34% of Black Democrats), disagreed that “Blacks should work their way up without special favors.” 2022 May 2, Zachary Goldberg, “Explaining Shifts in White Racial Liberalism: The Role of Collective Moral Emotions and Media Effects”, in Georgia State University, archived from the original on 25 Jan 2025, page 98:
A group of Black women came in later but only observed from the sidelines. 1986, Chaya Shalom, “The only dyke from Israel”, in Off Our Backs, volume 16, number 8, →JSTOR, page 26:
It contained an article written by Lacy Banko summarizing the work of Dr. Herbert Hendin, who had done a comparative study on suicide among Black people in the major American cities. Dr. Hendin found that the suicide rate among Black men between the ages of nineteen and thirty-five had doubled in the past ten to fifteen years, surpassing the rate for whites in the same age range. 1973, Huey P. Newton, J. Herman Blake, Revolutionary Suicide, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, →ISBN, page 3:
Capitalized to follow the usual capitalization patterns for ethnic groups (compare e.g. Hispanic, Arab), and also, perhaps, as a way to explicitly distinguish it from the color sense, which is not capitalized outside proper nouns.
Meanings
(alt-of) Alternative letter-case form of black (“person having dark pigmentation of the skin”).
By 2016, however, a divide that started appearing in the preceding few years came into full relief—that year, 29% of nonwhite liberals (28% of nonwhite Democrats) and 38% of Black liberals (34% of Black Democrats), disagreed that “Blacks should work their way up without special favors.” 2022 May 2, Zachary Goldberg, “Explaining Shifts in White Racial Liberalism: The Role of Collective Moral Emotions and Media Effects”, in Georgia State University, archived from the original on 25 Jan 2025, page 98:
The player moving the black pieces.
Unless the arbiter decides otherwise, ranks from White to Black shall be given the German numbers. 2022, “2023 Laws of Chess”, in FIDE, archived from the original on 16 Mar 2025, page 24: