Auster on Tanstaafl

At View From the Right, Larry Auster has a new tirade up against Tanstaafl:

Or, when I speak of “Europeans” and “blacks,” am I being pro-European and anti-black, but if I instead write “whites” and “Negroes,” I’ve suddenly switched to Negro supremacism? How ridiculous. Capitalization is governed by the nature of the word, not by a political or racial agenda. But racial ideologues like Tanstaafl, whose intellects are profoundly distorted by hatred, mainly hatred of Jews (Tanstaafl has proudly declared that the Jews are his enemy), are incapable of seeing beyond the most primitive simplifications.

Tanstaafl is right. Standard punctuation and spelling of racial terms has changed throughout history. Before the Civil War, the term “negro” was commonplace, somewhat derogatory and rarely capitalized. In the early twentieth century, W.E.B. DuBois and the NAACP later waged a long campaign to bring the capitalized “Negro” into circulation. “Black” was popularized by Malcolm X and the Black Power movement in the 1960s. “African-American” was popularized by Jesse Jackson in the 1980s.

Indians were referred to as the “savages” in the Declaration of Independence and well into the twentieth century as simply “Indians.” Conventional terms like “Native Americans” and “First Nations” are politically correct novelties and loaded in a way that delegitimizes the white majority of the United States and Canada. “Hispanic” and “Latino” are now used in place of “mestizo,” and so on.