Time to update the Commenteriat style guide

A few months ago, I began to notice something odd in news articles of media organizations, both major and niche. In headlines, hyperlinks and bodies of text, the word "black" -- both as a noun for people of non-Arab African descent and as adjective for people fitting that description -- had begun to appear with the "b" capitalized.

It has been many years since I cracked open an AP Style Book, the de facto standard for most American news organizations, so I thought faulty memory had led me erroneously to believe that both "black" and "white" had always been lowercase. Additionally, one of our esteemed Commenteriat colleagues pointed out to me in an unrelated thread that "Black" had appeared on government forms for as long as he could remember. I have no reason to doubt that that is true. Yet, it turns out many media outlets have in fact very recently made this stylistic change:

AP’s style is now to capitalize Black in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense, conveying an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa. The lowercase black is a color, not a person.

We also now capitalize Indigenous in reference to original inhabitants of a place.

These changes align with long-standing capitalization of other racial and ethnic identifiers such as Latino, Asian American and Native American. Our discussions on style and language consider many points, including the need to be inclusive and respectful in our storytelling and the evolution of language. We believe this change serves those ends.

 In my opinion, if the capitalized "Black" supplants the ungainly and potentially confusing "African-American," then good. When I think of all the awkward line justifications and jumps the latter has caused, a vein pulsates on the temple of my inner copy-editor. As for "Indigenous," I find it a mild improvement over the too-precious "Native American."

At the same time, the change raises uncomfortable questions about what want we believe the purpose of standardized language is. Is it to foster clear understanding between speaker and audience? Or is it to affirm the values of a political moment and apply different rules to people in the news based on their race? Proponents of the style change argue for the latter.

For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.

But in addition to being in accord with the logic of the style guide of the Daily Stormer, just with the colors reversed, this rationale runs into problems when one remembers that in many parts of the world, black people form distinct identities that may have little to do with their skin color. Does a black person from Brooklyn share a sense of "identity and community" with a black person of Nigerian heritage who grew up in a French banlieue more so than he does with a white person from Brooklyn? Perhaps, but probably no more so than a white person from Chevy Chase, Maryland, shares a sense of identity and community with a white person from Lapland.

Per this understanding, it is a kind of orthographic injustice to lowercase the B: to do so is to perpetuate the iniquity of an institution that uprooted people from the most ethnically diverse place on the planet, systematically obliterating any and all distinctions regarding ethnicity and culture. 

 In other words, if you're still using last year's AP Style Guide, you're a racist.