Capitalize B in Black and I in Indigenous.
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Hi all,
Today's newsletter looks at how language wields power, and how quickly our language is changing based on the movement of the past few weeks. I particularly liked writing this one because, as someone that's always defined herself as Black, I didn't know the grammatical and historical context of the terms below. I love that reclaiming something as simple as a capital letter can carry so much pride, belonging, and historical significance.
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- Nicole
TAKE ACTION
Capitalize the B in Black when using in reference to a person or group of people
Understand the cultural difference between "African American" and "Black" and use correctly. If you must, use "Black" if referring to a Black person and you are unclear of their background.
GET EDUCATED
Capitalizing to signify respect.
Last Friday (on Juneteenth) the Associated Press announced that it was updating its style guide to capitalize the "B" in "Black" and "I" in "Indigenous", a decision that came after several news outlets changed their own standards in the past few weeks to signify respect and understanding in the wake of the protests.
Although the difference between a capitalized letter may seem harmless, it carries weight. Our language carries power, and, according to Lori Tharps, an associate professor of journalism at Temple University, "influences how we validate, or invalidate, identity". And with Black there's history with how we have been perceived in the press. W.E.B DuBois fought in the 1890s for the term "negro," which was commonly used at the time, to be written as "Negro," considering all other racial and ethnic identifiers were already being written in uppercase. As the word negro phased out in the mid-1960s and was replaced with "black," the conversation restarted to continue to add respect to the term that identifies a community of people systemically marginalized because of the color of their skin. You can read more about the historical significance here >
Both terms Black and Indigenous represent distinct communities with shared cultures and experiences that differ from dominant culture, or whiteness. According to Sapiens, capitalizing Indigenous helps to "articulate the common challenges they faced as communities impacted by colonialism, settler governments, displacement, and exploitation." Similarly, capitalizing Black signifies "an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa" (via Axois). As a contrast to these definitions, the lowercase "black" is a color, not a person. And the lowercase "indigenous" signifies that anyone is from any place.
"When a copyeditor deletes the capital ‘B,’ they are in effect deleting the history and contributions of my people.”
– Lori Tharps, Associate Professor of Journalism at Temple University
So we're capitalizing Black now. What about "white"?
The AP is actively reviewing their guidelines on this, but currently has "white" used as lowercase in their style guide. But standards on this vary in different publications, and in personal opinions, for a multitude of reasons. To fully understand it, we have to first acknowledge that race itself is a social construct, formed and shaped over history. Race was a way to yield power and privileges over others, and preserve identities from being "tainted" by others. I'm simplifying, and recommend this article by Ta-nehisi Coates for details.
The need to add respect and understanding to the Black community is also in response to whiteness. I mentioned above that acknowledging Black and Indigenous as a community helps to "articulate the common challenges," and these challenges are an effect of being marginalized and exploited by dominant culture (more on that here). Some use this point to argue against white being capitalized, because white people already have enough power and don't need further acknowledgement. In these cases, some writers also note that white supremacists often capitalize white to demonstrate that they should remain in power. I paraphrased a detailed perspective you can read here >
On the other hand, other journalisms note that without identifying whiteness as its own race that, in itself, includes practices of racism and oppression, we won't move forward with it. Not identifying white as its own race also perpetuates the idea that it's the normal and status quo. The Center for the Study of Social Policy announced that it would follow the American Psychological Association’s style rules and capitalize white, citing the following:
"We believe that it is important to call attention to White as a race as a way to understand and give voice to how Whiteness functions in our social and political institutions and our communities. Moreover, the detachment of ‘White’ as a proper noun allows White people to sit out of conversations about race and removes accountability from White people’s and White institutions’ involvement in racism". You can read their full statement here >
Another argument on this is purely grammatical: if Black is capitalized, white should be too. They both are used as proper nouns and represent groups of people, and it looks unbalanced without.
I used the AP style guide for the sake of writing this email, as did most of the articles linked, so you can see it in action for yourself.
Why not African-American?
The term is still commonly used, but doesn't reflect the breadth of the Black population. African American refers to an American Black person of African descent. But there are Black people that more closely identify their roots to the Caribbean, for example, so Caribbean American may be preferred, and this person can also identify as Black. There are also Black people all around the world that may not have roots here; as of 2016, about 10% of Black people in the United States are foreign born.
For some Black people there's also a cultural difference. I am an African American woman, but personally feel more connected to the broad definition of Black; my African heritage is unknown to me, and I've also got Portuguese blood in my ancestry. Black, to me, feels more representative of the full complexity of my identity.
Also, the hyphen between African-American and all other race / ethnicity mashups was removed by the AP Style guide in 2019, noting that the hyphen dates to the 19th century as a way to distinguish immigrants as “other” and has been a common microaggression for more than a century.
I personally didn't know anything about the hyphens until researching this piece, and will reflect in my future emails.
ps – remember our conversation on diversifying news and media? Note that the AP and Poynter, another prominent voice in journalistic standards, announced this news without citing any Black or Indigenous journalists. As this conversation grows, there's another conversation on ensuring Black and Indigenous journalists are in the newsrooms to help guide this narrative.
Black America is constituted overwhelmingly by the descendants of people who were not only brought to the country against their will but were later inducted into an ambivalent form of citizenship without their input. The Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to all those born here, supposedly resolved the question of the status of ex-slaves, though those four million individuals were not consulted in its ratification. The unspoken yield of this history is the possibility that the words “African” and “American” should not be joined by a hyphen but separated by an ellipsis.
– Jelani Cobb for the New Yorker
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