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We affirm the aff with the B in Black being capitalized the B in Black should be capitalized it’s key for reconnection through ethnic identity, the distinction between African peoples, colors, and Black folks and it’s the only way to recognize the inequities of slavery
Alicita Rodriguez, 21, Alicita Rodriguez is a member of the University of communications at the university of Denver, Is the B in Black Capitalized? Yes., UC Denver News, February 24, 2021//ATW
The summer of 2020 was a turning point for many style manuals—and the capitalization of the word Black is now the norm.
Generally, style guides, which set language conventions for specific groups and/or professions, are not quick to change. Many years can pass between new editions, in fact, and there can be contentious discussions among these language arbiters on things as simple as whether to hyphenate email.
When referring to Black people as a distinct racial and ethnic group, however, almost all style guides opted for capitalization last year after the Black Lives Matter protests. We asked Professor Rachel E. Harding, who teaches in CU Denver’s Department of Ethnic Studies, to explain the capitalization issue.
“Yes, Black should be capitalized,” she said. Harding pointed to an article by The Columbia Journalism Review, which explains that “in the absence of the identifiable ethnicities slavery stole from those it subjugated, Black can be a preferred ethnic designation for some descendants.”
Reasons for Capitalizing Black
Style manuals, as well as notable magazines and newspapers, give different reasons for their decision to capitalize Black. In an article titled “Why We’re Capitalizing Black,” Marc Lacey, national editor for The New York Times, said, “It seems like such a minor change, black versus Black. But for many people the capitalization of that one letter is the difference between a color and a culture.” Associated Press (AP) makes the same point: “The lowercase black is a color, not a person.”
One practical reason for using Black instead of African American relates to geography—not everyone who identifies as Black identifies as African American, either because they do not view themselves as African and/or as American. Black people outside the United States have traditionally preferred the term Black. African American (not hyphenated) is acceptable when Black individuals or groups prefer it. “African American generally refers to Black people who have lived in the United States for at least two generations, and more specifically to those who are descendants of the Africans who were enslaved in North America,” Harding explained. “Black is the more comprehensive term.”
Language Reflects History
The Diversity Style Guide was the first style manual to capitalize Black, and Columbia Journalism Review proclaimed its adoption of the term relatively early in 2020. Both point out that slavery is directly related to the capitalization of Black. Columbia Journalism Review stated that “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.”
Language is always in flux. It reflects socio-cultural norms, which necessarily means that language and power intersect. Terms like negro, colored, people of color, African American, and Black “correspond to different periods in our history and arose within specific political and social contexts related to the struggle for greater democracy and, in particular, to the fight for justice and human/civil rights for Black people and other people of color in the U.S.,” Harding said.
There seems to be a causal relationship between the Black Lives Matter protests and the capitalization of Black, as illustrated by the list of authoritative style guides that adopted the term Black during 2020.
Capitalizing white understands whiteness as a “unified identity” which relies on white supremacist ideas of “white culture” and ignores the shared dispossession of other minorities
Mike Laws, 20, Mike Laws is a freelance copy editor and occasional writer who roves and trawls the greater New York City area. He is originally from Maryland’s Eastern Shore and still, Columbia Journalism Review, JUNE 16, 2020//ATW
At the Columbia Journalism Review, we capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms. For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.
In deciding on a styling, fusspot grammarians and addled copy editors generally fall back on a pair of considerations. 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 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 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. 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.”
And, 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 [and] 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.”
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. When people identify with specific terms of the African diaspora, we defer to those; in the absence of the identifiable ethnicities slavery stole from those it subjugated, Black can be a preferred ethnic designation for some descendants. (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. See, this spooky thing called slavery happened and my entire ethnic identity was erased.”)
If capping the B strikes you as in part a project of reclamation, well, it is. As The Diversity Style Guide notes,
There are various historical, social and political reasons why one might prefer to identify as Black. 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. Self-identification might reflect feelings about origin, affiliation, colonialism, enslavement and cultural dispossession.
That argument persuaded CJR to change its style (in defiance of a piece published on our site a few years earlier). Glover, in her article, called on the Associated Press stylebook (“the bible for working journalists”) to update its entry. Given the timing, after the killing of George Floyd and in light of a global reckoning with race relations, I’d be surprised if the AP didn’t take heed, and soon. In the meantime—and in what is surely a sign of evolving American attitudes on the topic—USA Today has announced that it will be adopting the cap-B Black across its network, which includes the flagship paper and “more than 260 local news organizations.” (The man responsible for issuing the editorial fiat, Michael McCarter, was named managing editor of standards, ethics, and inclusion exactly one day before making the call.)
This all makes for a good start, but it will mean nothing if white Americans don’t make an effort to understand the whys and wherefores—which is to say, the history that delivered us to this precise point in time. That, of course, will be a taller order than simply asking them to capitalize one little letter.
Capitalizing the B in Black doesn’t convey further importance they place too much power in labels. Capitalizing black shifts it from a socially produced racial categorizations to a static biological category which reifies white supremacy
Different TAG
Capitalizing the B in black while not capitalizing the W in white reifies the idea that white is natural while pathologizing blackness and other racial categorizations
Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampim Kusi Appiah, 20, Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampim Kusi Appiah, The Case for Capitalizing the B in Black, The Atlantic, JUNE 18, 2020//ATW
And there’s plainly a rationale for capitalizing black in order to head off ambiguity (what am I referring to when I refer to “black hair”?). For many advocates of the uppercase, though, the stakes are far greater. “Black with a capital ‘B’ refers to a group of people whose ancestors were born in Africa, were brought to the United States against their will, spilled their blood, sweat and tears to build this nation into a world power and along the way managed to create glorious works of art, passionate music, scientific discoveries, a marvelous cuisine, and untold literary masterpieces,” Lori L. Tharps, who teaches journalism at Temple University, wrote in 2015. “When a copyeditor deletes the capital ‘B,’ they are in effect deleting the history and contributions of my people.” Or as Anne Price, the president of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, put it last year: “capitalizing Black is about claiming power.” When W. E. B. Du Bois campaigned, back in the 1920s, for Negro, rather than negro, he remarked, mordantly: “Eight million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.” According to the diversity committee of USA Today, which decided last week to capitalize the B-word, the change reflected “understanding and respect.”
What complicates things is that, as a rule, capitalizing a word doesn’t convey elevation: We don’t rank Masonite over mahogany. Written languages are not highly consistent, to be sure, so we generalize at some peril. But in English, the long-standing convention is to capitalize proper nouns and proper names, which are terms that refer to what philosophers call “particulars” or “individuals”—a specific person, place, or thing. We routinely name and capitalize entities (the Middle Ages, January, the Pacific Ocean, Copenhagen) that reflect human interests or actions. On the other hand, we tend not to capitalize “natural kinds”—that is, categories that track with inherent features of the world, independent of our interests or doings. Einstein, the physicist, is capitalized; einsteinium, the element, is not.
A good reason to capitalize the racial designation “black,” then, is precisely that black, in this sense, is not a natural category but a social one—a collective identity—with a particular history. (“Race is psychology, not biology” is a formulation Du Bois once offered.) What’s more, the very label “black” plays a role in generating that identity.
That’s how social identities work. The specific labels can shift over time (Negro, colored, Afro-American), but they help to bring into existence the group to which they refer. A pack of gray wolves exists regardless of our naming practices; they don’t need to know that they’re “gray wolves.” But to be black involves (among other things) identifying as black or being identified as black—usually both. Identity labels come with norms, and so a black person sometimes does things as a black person, is sometimes treated as a black person. (Because that treatment has its effects on you whether you like it or not, your race isn’t generally up to just you.) Social identities aren’t reducible to a label, but labels play a role in generating and sustaining them.
Conventions of capitalization can help signal that races aren’t natural categories, to be discovered in the world, but products of social forces. Giving black a big B could signal that it’s not a generic term for some feature of humanity but a name for a particular human-made entity. To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, one is not born, but rather becomes, black—and the same goes for all of our social identities.
So what about white folks? The style guide of the American Psychological Association declares, as it has for a generation: “Racial and ethnic groups are designated by proper nouns and are capitalized. Therefore, use ‘Black’ and ‘White’ instead of ‘black’ and ‘white.’” That seems sensible enough. But for some people, White is the sticking point. As The American Heritage Dictionary (on whose usage panel, now disbanded, I have served) ventured, in its fourth edition: “In all likelihood, uncertainty as to the mode of styling of white has dissuaded many publications from adopting the capitalized form Black.”
If you consider the capital letter to be a conferral of dignity, you may balk at the symmetry. “We strongly believe that leaving white in lowercase represents a righting of a long-standing wrong and a demand for dignity and racial equity,” Price, of the Insight Center, wrote. Until the wrongs against black people have been righted, she continued, “we cannot embrace equal treatment in our language.” The capital letter, in her view, amounts to cultural capital—a benefit that white people should be awarded only after white supremacy has been rolled back.
Capitalizing white understands whiteness as a “unified identity” which relies on white supremacist ideas of “white culture” and ignores the shared dispossession of other minorities
Mike Laws, 20, Mike Laws is a freelance copy editor and occasional writer who roves and trawls the greater New York City area. He is originally from Maryland’s Eastern Shore and still, Columbia Journalism Review, JUNE 16, 2020//ATW
At the Columbia Journalism Review, we capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms. For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.
In deciding on a styling, fusspot grammarians and addled copy editors generally fall back on a pair of considerations. 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 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 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. 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.”
And, 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 [and] 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.”
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. When people identify with specific terms of the African diaspora, we defer to those; in the absence of the identifiable ethnicities slavery stole from those it subjugated, Black can be a preferred ethnic designation for some descendants. (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. See, this spooky thing called slavery happened and my entire ethnic identity was erased.”)
If capping the B strikes you as in part a project of reclamation, well, it is. As The Diversity Style Guide notes,
There are various historical, social and political reasons why one might prefer to identify as Black. 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. Self-identification might reflect feelings about origin, affiliation, colonialism, enslavement and cultural dispossession.
That argument persuaded CJR to change its style (in defiance of a piece published on our site a few years earlier). Glover, in her article, called on the Associated Press stylebook (“the bible for working journalists”) to update its entry. Given the timing, after the killing of George Floyd and in light of a global reckoning with race relations, I’d be surprised if the AP didn’t take heed, and soon. In the meantime—and in what is surely a sign of evolving American attitudes on the topic—USA Today has announced that it will be adopting the cap-B Black across its network, which includes the flagship paper and “more than 260 local news organizations.” (The man responsible for issuing the editorial fiat, Michael McCarter, was named managing editor of standards, ethics, and inclusion exactly one day before maki

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