The Associated Press guidelines on word usage state that when a writer is referring to Black people in a racial, cultural or ethnic sense, the “B” should be capitalized.
But when it comes to white people, we don’t capitalize the “w.” WTF? With a capital W.
This follows similar guidelines across most media outlets, although not surprisingly, more conservative ones opt to stick with capital W for White to describe that “ethnic group.” Oh, Fox News.
I digress.
This capital B in Black usage “when referring to (and out of respect for) the Black diaspora” came at the urging of the National Association of Black Journalists.
While nobody should lose any sleep over these seemingly inconsistent standards for a mere word, doesn’t it seem a bit odd and maybe even unfair to white folks?
Don’t white people count as much as Black people? You know, that All Lives Matter stuff.
The thing is, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. They have shared life experiences. A sense of belonging and comraderie.
“White” does not.
You may have white friends. Your community may even have similar white skin. But there’s no “identity” or shared community just for being white. Let’s be honest — the only ones who might think so are white supremacists. And why would we want to follow their lead?
Of course we capitalize the “I” in Irish in Irish Americans. Or Italian in Italian Americans.
We’ve been capitalizing ethnic groups, including Asian, Hispanic, Jewish African American and Native American, for ages.
So all we’re doing when we capitalize Black and not white is following AP’s well-accepted writing guidelines, as well as the Chicago Manual of Style’s (§8.38) edict that states “names of ethnic and national groups are capitalized.”
There just isn’t a white ethnic group unless you’re a Proud Boy, Nazi or Klansman.
But is Black really an ethnic group?
It’s complicated but important to understand.
I recall when “African American” became the norm to refer to Black Americans at the request of Jesse Jackson in the late 1980s and thinking how unjust it was to lump one of the most ethnically diverse continents on the planet into one giant “Africa.” Stripping, yet again, people of their indigenous dignity as if slavery wasn’t enough. I never liked Jesse anyway.
But as a white guy, I decided in 1989 to just accept it since, after all, it’s Black Americans who should get to decide what they want to be called, not the rest of us.
Still, while most American Black people descend from slaves taken from the continent of Africa, and therefore are technically of “African” descent, they were far from being a monolith.
They came from distinct places we know today as Senegal, Guinea-Bissau and Mali. Angola, Congo, Gabon. Nigeria, Cameroon and Ghana. From a massive variety of ethnic and religious groups within each of those countries.
When we switched from the designation “African American,” which we all had no problem capitalizing, to “Black,” we’re in a sense allowing this group, Black people, to dive deeper into their DNA and trace their deeper ethnic roots. To stop labeling everyone as just “African” as if that is one place.
Black Americans of course have a shared communal, cultural, traumatic, and familial identity.
But on a deeper level, capitalizing the B is providing the space for Black Americans to reclaim their specific ancestral connection and dignity, like the rest of us Irish, Italian, Japanese, Mexican, Jewish and German Americans already have done for generations.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Jeffrey Kass' work on Medium.