Conversations about the change
The Times in July 2020 on why Black instead of black:
“We believe this style best conveys elements of shared history and identity, and reflects our goal to be respectful of all the people and communities we cover,” said Dean Baquet, The Times’s executive editor, and Phil Corbett, associate managing editor for standards, in a memo to staff.
Conversations about the change began in earnest at The Times and elsewhere after the death of George Floyd and subsequent protests, said Mike Abrams, senior editor for editing standards. Several major news media organizations have made the same call including The Associated Press, whose stylebook has long been an influential guide for news organizations.
“It seems like such a minor change, black versus Black,” The Times’s National editor, Marc Lacey, said. “But for many people the capitalization of that one letter is the difference between a color and a culture.”
As tensions rose across the country, Mr. Abrams noticed members of the newsroom raising questions about the capital B and sharing articles on the subject in Slack, the workplace chat platform. He talked with editors at other publications, including The A.P. and The Washington Post, about conversations happening in their newsrooms. And he talked with Times staff members: more than 100 of them, by phone, email and Slack.
“The lowercase B in Black has never made sense to me as a Black woman, and it didn’t make sense to me as a Black girl,” said Destinée-Charisse Royal, a senior staff editor in the Graphics department and one of the editors consulted on the change. “My thought was that the capital B makes sense as it describes a race, a cultural group, and that is very different from a color in a box of crayons.”
It’s all somewhat confusing, in my view. I don’t object to it, I just don’t quite understand how it works. One could have said the same about “Negro” in the past, yet that word sounds and looks simply terrible now. That must be because it was used before the Civil Rights movement really got going, while the shift to “black” started with the radicals. M.L. King said “Negro”; Angela Davis said “black.” (Or did she say “Black”? I don’t know.) (Of course there were and are plenty who used that other word.)
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.
Hm. What do they mean? Again, I’m not disagreeing, just not clear on the argument.
I suppose what they must mean is that white doesn’t represent the long struggle that Black does. The “shared culture and history” is a shared history of abuse and injustice and exploitation, a shared history of creating a fuck ton of wealth for white people while being gripped in poverty themselves. It’s also a shared history of surviving that, and of struggling for justice and civil rights.
H/t Nullius in Verba
Anyway, it doesn’t matter, I don’t need to know how it works. It’s preferred, and not in the way “IT’S MA’AM!!!” is preferred, so I use it.
Interesting. I guess it’s a much more recent thing than I had expected. Now I’m dwelling on the question of whether and how it applies in Canada, the UK and other countries with black/Black populations that are culturally and historically distinct from U.S. African Americans.
It’s a bit ideologically contradictory for the same people who talk about various things (e.g., punctuality, professionalism, objectivity, the nuclear family, etc.) as being part of white culture, or about how to be white is to have a particular cultural perspective, to then say that white doesn’t indicate a shared culture or history. I mean, I’d actually agree that it doesn’t, but I don’t see how they can say it and be consistent.
Here is some history, in a 2014 NYT opinion piece:
The Case for Black With a Capital B
For what it’s worth, the Washington Post has been capitalizing both Black and White for a few years now. I can see the logic—there’s no objective criteria that you can apply to say who is Black and who is White.
As can the generic Asian, which encompasses so many widely separated cultures from the Earth’s largest continent that it is all-but meaningless as it tells us nothing about the people it is being used to refer to in any single instance.
So Black-with-a-capital-B refers only to those people of African ancestry who have slave ancestors, and not to Africans who don’t?
Meh.
Out of consistency, I favor doing the same for “white” as “black”. My preference is to lowercase both, since they’re not proper names. When somebody has the surname Black or White, it’s capitalized (like Sirius Black in the Harry Potter series), but as a color it’s lowercase.
And yet ‘black’ and ‘negro’ have the same root meaning…. It strikes me that there are two likely causes for the rejection of ‘negro’, and that they are not mutually exclusive. One, obviously, is its closeness to that other word that must not be spoken and that plainly derives from it. The other is the impulse that it seems to me new or regenerated movements quite often manifest, which impels them to seize on new or distinctive terminology to mark their claim to a fresh energy and a more enlightened perspective. In particular I am reminded of the moment at the start of the seventies when the apostles of the new gay rights movement adjured homosexual people to reject ‘queer’ and proclaim ourselves ‘gay’.
Yes. It seems to me it’s very similar to the feminist rejection of the words “lady” and “girl” in favor of “woman.” No euphemisms thank you very much. “Negro” came to seem euphemistic and squeamish, as if “black” were ooky. “Black” was more direct, straightforward, proud. “Lady” was and is much the same.
The Atlantic had a fairly in-depth piece on arguments both for and against, even referencing the Tharps piece Sackbut linked.