![]() The term has historically connected people of African descent around the world and was revived during the Black Power Movement.… Black and then African American replaced older terms such as Colored and Negro imposed by others. There are various historical, social and political reasons why one might prefer to identify as Black. If capping the B strikes you as in part a project of reclamation, well, it is. See, this spooky thing called slavery happened and my entire ethnic identity was erased.”) (For a pop-culture consideration of this question, see the “Juneteenth” episode of Atlanta, in which a woke white husband asks Donald Glover’s character what part of “the motherland” he’s from, hazarding a guess that the answer might be “southeastern Bantu.” Glover responds, dryly, “I don’t know. When people identify with specific terms of the African diaspora, we defer to those i n the absence of the identifiable ethnicities slavery stole from those it subjugated, Black can be a preferred ethnic designation for some descendants. Per this understanding, it is a kind of orthographic injustice to lowercase the B : to do so is to perpetuate the iniquity of an institution that uprooted people from the most ethnically diverse place on the planet, systematically obliterating any and all distinctions regarding ethnicity and culture. Sarah Glover, a past president of the National Association of Black Journalists, wrote in a recent piece for the New York Amsterdam News, a historically Black weekly, that “capitalizing the ‘B’ in Black should become standard use to describe people, culture, art and communities.” After all, she pointed out, “We already capitalize Asian, Hispanic, African American and Native American.”Īnd, as my CJR colleague Alexandria Neason told me recently, “I view the term Black as both a recognition of an ethnic identity in the States that doesn’t rely on hyphenated Americanness (and is more accurate than African American, which suggests recent ties to the continent) and is also transnational and inclusive of our Caribbean Central/South American siblings.” To capitalize Black, in her view, is to acknowledge that slavery “deliberately stripped” people forcibly shipped overseas “of all other ethnic/national ties.” She added, “ African American is not wrong, and some prefer it, but if we are going to capitalize Asian and South Asian and Indigenous, for example, groups that include myriad ethnic identities united by shared race and geography and, to some degree, culture, then we also have to capitalize Black. The Diversity Style Guide (2019), produced by Rachele Kanigel in consultation with some fifty journalists and experts, takes it as a given that Black ought to be capitalized. In this case, it’s instructive to turn not to the largely lilywhite mainstream press (nor to the style guides that govern their renderings), but to writers of color and to alternative stylebooks. The first is broad adherence to a general rule-like, say, the Chicago Manual of Style ’s ( §8.38) edict that “Names of ethnic and national groups are capitalized.” (Though Chicago still generally mandates lowercasing both black and white, it does include the proviso that the rule can be suspended if “a particular author or publisher prefers otherwise.” ) The second thing we look for is attestation. In deciding on a styling, fusspot grammarians and addled copy editors generally fall back on a pair of considerations. White carries a different set of meanings capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists. For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. At the Columbia Journalism Review, we capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms.
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