Word policers are getting more hysterical about capital crimes. As I covered on Sept. 12 in this space, Dictionary.com decided that it “will be capitalizing Black throughout the entry when it is used in reference to people.” It argued that “not capitalizing Black in this context can be seen as dismissive, disrespectful, and dehumanizing.” Can be seen as.
Now, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and NBC News last week changed their practices to do the same, and the AP Stylebook and Poynter are debating following suit. A Columbia Journalism Review piece suggested the lowercase “b” is an “orthographic injustice.” And Chris Fusco, executive editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, is out with a letter to readers about a style-guide change to the same effect. It is so illiterate and moronic, I am quoting at length, since it serves as a historical document recording the panic over words that has seized the elite echelons of journalism right now:
“On Monday, we joined the growing list of news organizations around the country that have opted to capitalize Black when using the word to describe a culture, ethnicity or community of people. … We also instructed our journalists that in the event the terms Black and Brown are used together to collectively describe a group, we will capitalize the ‘B’ in both words, such as ‘Black and Brown communities.’ Our decision puts Black on the same level as Hispanic, Latino, Asian, African American and other descriptors. We also told our journalists to continue to lowercase the ‘w’ in white.
Our decision to capitalize Black is an acknowledgment of the long-standing inequities that have existed in our country, and the unique role that Black art and culture have played in our society. Cultural trends among white people … are much more disparate, which was a key factor in our decision not to capitalize white.”
I suppose I need to explain why this is so stupid. First, journalists do not cover only Americans, so it is not clear why cultural trends in “our society” should determine how we write about the ethnicities of the world. Anyway, there is no such ethnicity as “Hispanic,” a philosophically impossible-to-wrangle category of white and black and brown, colonizer and colonized and their mutual offspring, until you know what they’re called in Spanish: “hispanohablantes.” Spanish speakers.
Second, white Americans are now to be understood as having a less assimilated and more disparate set of cultural traditions than “Black” and “Brown” people? Let me repeat that in other words: A recent Hmong immigrant and the child of a Cuban refugee and a black Creole person whose family has been here longer than America has existed are all three part of the “Black and Brown communities,” which supposedly do not have among them as “disparate cultural trends” as do ethnically Polish and German residents of Chicago whose ancestors arrived in America in the late 19th century on the same boat.
Meanwhile, we are supposed to imagine a single “African diaspora.” Let me tell you something about ethnicity and diaspora and Africa: Burundi, the 45th-largest country in Africa, at about one-fifth the size of the state the Chicago Sun-Times publishes in, has seen more than 340,000 refugees of ethnic strife and violence flee since 2015 alone. Yet if I have this right, a Japanese man who moves his business from Tokyo to Atlanta is in some natural cultural coalition with someone who escapes to Boston from Burundi, since they’re both members of “Black and Brown communities.” The capital scolds said so.
