"With the disproportionate havoc this plague has wreaked on Black and brown people..."
— https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/opinion/racism-covid-vaccine.html
Does that look right to you? "Black" is capitalized, but "brown" is not. Why is that again?
"The Times also looked at whether to capitalize white and brown in reference to race, but both will remain lowercase. Brown has generally been used to describe a wide range of cultures, Mr. Baquet and Mr. Corbett said in their memo to staff. As a result, its meaning can be unclear to readers; white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does, and also has long been capitalized by hate groups."
—https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black.html
The reasons offered by Messrs. Baquet and Corbett don't hold up to scrutiny. NYT won't capitalize "white" because it "has long been capitalized by hate groups." Say what? WE won't capitalize it because THEY do? And NYT won't capitalize "Brown" because it has "generally been used to describe a wide range of cultures." Yet doesn't the term "Black," which could refer to people living all across the continent of Africa, or in Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere around the world, also "describe a a wide range of cultures"?
I don't care if both the New York Times and the Associated Press Stylebook have decreed that "Black" gets capitalized but "Brown" doesn't. It's wrong. Just as it would be wrong to capitalize "Christian" but not "jew" or "muslim."
I look forward to the day when people will no longer be discriminated against because of the color of their skin. And I look forward to the day when neither "black," nor "brown," nor "white," nor any other word used to designated the colors of the human race will receive preferential treatment.
Either capitalize all of them or capitalize none of them.