A debate over identity and race asks, are African Americans ‘Black’ or ‘black’?

It’s the difference between black and Black. A longtime push by African American scholars and writers to capitalise the word black in the context of race has gained acceptance in recent weeks and unleashed a deep debate over identity, race and power.

>>John EligonThe New York Times
Published : 27 June 2020, 06:57 AM
Updated : 27 June 2020, 06:57 AM

Hundreds of news organisations over the past month have changed their style to Black in reference to the race of people, including The Associated Press, long considered an influential arbiter of journalism style. Far more than a typographical change, the move is part of a generations-old struggle over how best to refer to those who trace their ancestry to Africa.

The capitalisation of black, which has been pushed for years, strikes at deeper questions over the treatment of people of African descent, who were stripped of their identities and enslaved in centuries past, and whose struggles to become fully accepted as part of the American experience continue to this day.

“Blackness fundamentally shapes any core part of any Black person’s life in the US context, and really around the world,” said Brittney Cooper, an associate professor at Rutgers University whose latest book, “Eloquent Rage,” explores Black feminism. “In the choice to capitalise, we are paying homage to a history with a very particular kind of political engagement.”

The move toward Black is not embraced by all African Americans, and two of the country’s major news outlets, The New York Times and The Washington Post, are still wrestling over whether to make the change. (The New York Times News Service, however, follows Associated Press style and normally capitalises Black.)

“Black is a colour,” said the Rev Jesse L Jackson, the longtime civil rights leader who popularised the term “African American” in an effort to highlight the cultural heritage of those with ancestral ties to Africa. “We built the country through the African slave trade. African American acknowledges that. Any term that emphasises the colour and not the heritage separates us from our heritage.”

There are also concerns that turning black into a proper noun lumps people of the African diaspora into a monolithic group and erases the diversity of their experiences. Some have said it bestows credibility upon a social construct created to oppress Black people. Perhaps the most notable concern is what to do about white and brown as racial identifiers.

So far, most news organisations have declined to capitalise white, generally arguing that it is an identifier of skin colour, not shared experience, and that white supremacist groups have adopted that convention.

But some scholars say that to write “Black” but not “White” is to give white people a pass on seeing themselves as a race and recognising all the privileges they get from it.

“Whiteness is not incidental,” sociologist Eve Ewing wrote on Twitter in arguing to capitalise white as well. She added, “Whiteness is a thing. Whiteness is endowed with social meaning that allows people to move through the world in a way that people who are not white are not able to do.”

At a recent online meeting of Race/Related, a cross-desk team devoted to race coverage at the Times, a discussion of whether to capitalise black or not made clear that there is not universal agreement, even among African Americans on the staff.

“It has been the subject of a lively and surprising debate,” said Dean Baquet, the executive editor, who has indicated he will announce a decision on the issue soon.

The debate over racial vocabulary is unfolding amid growing recognition across society of the need to tackle racism after several high-profile police killings of Black people led to protests nationwide.

The acceptable terms in America for identifying Black people have evolved over generations, from coloured to Negro to black and African American. Also commonly used is “people of colour,” an umbrella term used to include many ethnic minorities.

In the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, which has unleashed a national conversation on questions of race and racism, many say the country is long overdue to standardise the use of the uppercase B in black, which has been commonly used at Black media outlets for a long time.

The New York Amsterdam News, for instance, describes itself as “the oldest Black newspaper in the country that offers the ‘New Black View’ within local, national and international news for the Black community.”

The debate among Black people in America over how they should be described has often centred on identity as a political statement.

In her 1904 essay “Do We Need Another Name?” Fannie Barrier Williams, an educator and activist, described a lively discussion unfolding at the time among African American scholars over whether to shed the label Negro in favour of terms like coloured or Afro-American. Coloured, she wrote, was a “name that is suggestive of progress toward respectful recognition.”

At the heart of the discussion, she wrote, was whether African Americans needed a new label divorced from Negro and its connections to slavery, something of a fresh start that indicated their new place in society as free people.

Some, like WEB Du Bois, favoured keeping the term Negro and transforming it into something positive — an affirmation of their perseverance as a people and their freedom.

“There are so many Negroes who are not Negroes, so many coloured people who are not coloured, and so many Afro-Americans who are not Africans that it is simply impossible even to coin a term that will precisely designate and connote all the people who are now included under any one of the terms mentioned,” Barrier Williams wrote.

Negro became the predominant identifier of people of African descent for much of the first half of the 20th century. Even then, descendants of enslaved people from Africa waged a yearslong campaign before getting most of society, including the Times, to capitalise it.

With the rise of the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s, the word black, once seen as an insult for many African Americans, started winning embrace. In just a few years, it became the predominant descriptor of Black people as Negro became obsolete. Jackson’s campaign brought African American into popular use in the late 1980s, and it is now often used interchangeably with Black.

For proponents of capitalising black, there are grammatical reasons: It is a proper noun referring to a specific group of people with a shared political identity shaped by colonialism and slavery. But some see it as a moral issue as well.

It confers a sense of power and respect to Black people, who have often been relegated to the lowest rungs of society through racist systems, Black scholars say.

“Race as a concept is not real in the biological sense, but it’s very real for our own identities,” said Whitney Pirtle, an assistant professor of sociology specialising in critical race theory at the University of California, Merced. “I think that capitalising B both sort of puts respect to those identities but also alludes to the humanities.”

Vilna Bashi Treitler, a professor of Black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said that racial categories were fabricated, created to denigrate people considered to be nonwhite. Black and white are adjectives, not proper nouns to be capitalised, she said, calling a term like “African descendant” a more appropriate way to characterise Black people.

“It’s a placeholder for describing the group of people who are perpetually reinserted into the bottom of the racial hierarchy,” Bashi Treitler, author of the book “The Ethnic Project,” said of the term black. “I think we can be more revolutionary than to embrace the oppressor’s term for us.”

In her first two books, Crystal M Fleming, a sociologist and author, lowercased black in part because of academic differences between race and ethnicity. But the more she researched, the more those distinctions became blurred in her mind. She came to see race as a concept that could signify a politically and culturally meaningful identity.

Now Fleming, a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and author of “How to be Less Stupid About Race,” is writing a book for young people about fighting racism. She has decided to use Black.

Part of the reason, she said, was her desire to honour Black experiences and speak with moral clarity about anti-racism. Another reason was more basic, born in the urgency of the current moment.

“Frankly,” she said, “because I want to. That’s also something that I think we need to see more of in every field — Black people doing what we want to do.”

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