Will the press ever apologize for racist capitalization?

During the George Floyd Racial Reckoning, most of the news media decided to mandate writing "whites and Blacks" as a racist insult of whites. Will they stop?

In the New York Times, centrist black linguist John McWhorter and centrist journalist David Leonhardt try to make sense of current race and ethnicity designations like “Black and white” or “Latinx” along with the brouhaha over cancelling teams named for American Indians.

‘African American’ Is Awkward. It’s Time to Use ‘Black.’

The linguist John McWhorter on how language around racial identity is evolving.

July 29, 2025

… McWhorter: In 1988, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson had a massive influence on the Black community, he basically declared that we need to start calling ourselves African Americans rather than Black, because Black was too crude and general to capture all the different shades that we are.

And I think the idea also was that to add the African part was to give a note of pride, a note of heritage. And so it happened very quickly. If you were alive and mature at the time, it was as if all of a sudden one week you were supposed to say African American rather than Black.

I never much liked it. I didn’t rail against it, but it never felt right to me because I’m Black. I’m a Black American, but to me the African connection is too long ago. It’s too abstract.

I would argue instead that Jesse Jackson’s intervention worked out pretty well. Our culture was less cancel prone back then, so he didn’t succeed in banning the word “black.” Offhand, I don’t recall anybody getting in trouble for continuing to use the word “black,” which had been standard since the late 1960s a couple of decades before.

But Jesse did succeed in approving the synonym “African American.”

Having two respectable, non-controversial synonyms was useful for writers, allowing them to engage in Elegant Variation. Instead of writing a paragraph that repetitiously repeats black, black, black, black, black, I could mix them up a little and write black, African American, black, African American, black instead.

One obvious issue that has emerged since the late 1980s is that we now have a sizable black but not all that American population of immigrant or visitor background. It would be useful to be able to distinguish blacks like Barack Obama who have no ancestral links to American slaves from blacks like Michelle Obama, whose four grandparents were all descended from American slaves.

“African American” can’t be easily adopted for that purpose because it’s highly ambiguous whether you are referring to Barack, whose father was born and died in Africa, or to Michelle, whose ancestors have probably almost all been born in America since at least around 1808 when the transAtlantic slave trade was outlawed.

Some blacks have come up with term “American Descendants of Slaves” (ADOS), but …

Paywall here.