88V8 wrote: Those tribes who major in killing one another in SA seem not to have heard that, nor the Blacks & Asians who don't get on over here.
Friction between blacks and Asians is an instructive example. I feel sure that examples can be found that pre-date this, but some trace that back to the mid 1960s in America. During that period when civil rights legislation was being passed by Congress, an article appeared in the New York Times describing the economic and professional success that Asian immigrants to the US were enjoying. Coupling that with the perception that Asians emphasise family values and have a low participation rate in crime, the author coined the phrase "model minority" for Asian-Americans. And for good measure used the phrase "problem minorities" for the other non-white minorities.
Not very PC you might think, at least by contemporary standards. But the concept caught on and by the 1980s, the term "model minority" was widely used in the media to pile adoration onto this super race, just as Japan reached peak power, with its stock market at one point being 40% of global market cap.
But the black community did not like this at all. It undermined their principal argument that being a non-white minority entailed under-performance, which must be addressed by affirmative action, anti-discrimination laws, handouts and the rest. Worse it wasn't just that Asians were out-performing blacks and Hispanics, they were out-performing whites. And so the 1980s also saw a wave of attacks, violence and crimes against Asians and Asian businesses. And friction between the two groups has persisted to this day.
In some ways this mirrors how anti-semitism grew as a result of the perception that Jews are disproportionately successful. And in the same way as that can lead some left-wingers to criticise Jews and Jewish institutions, so the white liberal elite sought to try and puncture this idea that Asians really did perform so well.
Coming back to the topic, I find it does feel right to capitalise words like Jews, Asians, Hispanics and Arabs, because they refer to proper names of regions or religions. But the words "whites" and "blacks" do not share that feature, to my ear. But either way you capitalise both or neither.