Some think it may do the opposite, as Kwame Anthony Appiah , a professor of philosophy and law at New York University suggested in the Atlantic in June. This a positive step but it must not be the final step toward racial equity in media coverage. News U. Politics Joe Biden Congress Extremism. Special Projects Highline. HuffPost Personal Video Horoscopes. Follow Us. Terms Privacy Policy.
All rights reserved. By treating Black as a name and white as a fact, the style guide would exempt white people from history—a rather troubling history at that.
Without the theory and practice of racism, there are neither blacks nor whites. Nor did whiteness arrive as some fully formed and stable social category. In his day, Jewish and southern-European immigrants hardly qualified as white. We naturalize the workings of racism. More than a few institutions have been mindful of this peril.
Call them out by their names. White-supremacist websites have been known to capitalize the w in white ; by doing the same, do we lend them support? Supremacists would have to find another way to ennoble themselves. A final word of caution: Reasoned arguments about linguistic usages must always reckon with the fact that language is a set of conventions, to be determined by the consensus of language users. But in this country, the process of language reform is complicated.
What vox populi retains is veto power. Nor had earlier candidates such as Anglo-African and Africo-American. A reason the ethnonym African American did take, starting in the late s, was the endorsement of high-profile black Americans, notably Jesse Jackson. Give it time. Informal deliberations among a larger community of users will produce a new consensus, and create new facts of language.
Words are public property; so are capital letters. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Journalists and scholars both contribute to the realm of print and digital publication i. And right now that wordscape is unsettled. Journalists have the most immediate impact but scholars build the canon of knowledge and culture.
So the personal issue of black identity and case style preference becomes a public question with no single answer. Because of its inherent ambiguity, this question should be examined further by journalists. Black scholars and other professional black writers who retain lowercase black style are keenly aware of the sense of formal identity, pride and solidarity that uppercase black implies.
They feel this sensitivity and still have specific reasons for their own lowercase usage. Some also are concerned about the pervasive standardization of uppercase black style. Blanket standardization obliterates the nuanced nature of black identities and assigns them to an official catch-all category. The Melanesians black people of the South Pacific and the black people of Halifax, Nova Scotia, are as historically and culturally different as white Mississippians and the people of the Russian steppes.
The rationale that black should be capitalized because it is a national identity for black Americans who do not know their African ethnicities makes uppercased black a provisional, placeholder ID. Black Americans can compensate for the amputation of African and other unknown identities by identifying them.
Some black writers use lowercase black style because this looser fit allows for the emergence of more precise ways of identifying ourselves.
The lowercase black identifier is generic because it represents a broad range of ethnicities and nationalities. Its generic function requires a lowercase style.
The neutrality and generic nature of the lowercase black and white style is often necessary for academic writers, for example scholars who specialize in physical anthropology, or medieval and early modern European history there were black people in Europe at that time.
For such scholars, capping black in referring to African and African descended peoples would be an inappropriate, symbolic embellishment. The convention of capitalizing black has been an appropriate in-group style within the popular black press in the United States.
However, the sweeping standardization of uppercase black style in mainstream media has the unintended effect of fortifying categorical conceptions of race. That fortification has racializing repercussions throughout society, including the increased capitalization of white. The question of capping black is not simply one of whether it validates an outworn concept of race. While standardization provides a formalized identity for African descendants in the U.
A cursory review of public commentary by average black adults who are interested in discussing social and political issues reveals no consensus that black should be capped.
An authoritarian practice is developing in U. Now that the shift is established, the next step can be to consider the multiplicity of black American identities and formulate IDs based on those considerations.
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