The Vibe Shift Hasn't Happened
The Mainstream Media still capitalize "Blacks" but not "whites"
In the weeks following George Floyd’s demise on May 25, 2020, most of the major institutional media outlets in the United States, such as the Associated Press and the New York Times, decided that henceforth they would exalt “Blacks” by capitalizing their racial denonym and demean “whites” by lower-casing their name.
The justifications given for upper-casing “Blacks” and lower-casing “whites” were transparently motivated by racist hate.
For example, it was widely stated by the Prestige Press that blacks had a “shared culture” while whites did not that. The New York Times asserted:
The Times has changed its style on the term’s usage to better reflect a shared cultural identity. Here’s what led to that decision.
By Nancy Coleman
July 5, 2020
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
The last time The New York Times made a sweeping call to capitalize how it referred to people of African ancestry was nearly a century ago.
W.E.B. Du Bois had started a letter-writing campaign asking publications, including The Times, to capitalize the N in Negro, a term long since eradicated from The Times’s pages. “The use of a small letter for the name of twelve million Americans and two hundred million human beings,” he once wrote, was “a personal insult.”
The Times turned him down in 1926 before coming around in 1930, when the paper wrote that the new entry in its stylebook — its internal guide on grammar and usage — was “not merely a typographical change,” but “an act in recognition of racial self-respect.”Decades later, a monthlong internal discussion at The Times led the paper on Tuesday to make, for similar reasons, its latest style change on race — capitalizing Black when describing people and cultures of African origin.
“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,
What a name!
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.”
After all, white people are just crayons.
For example, the Ethiopian Emperor Ras Tafari (Haile Selassie) and singer …
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