A proper noun gets written as one.
“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,” wrote John Daniszewski, the AP’s vice president for standards, in a blog post. “The lowercase black is a color, not a person.”
The AP announcement wasn’t as dramatic as tearing down a Confederate monument, but it was an influential turning point in an ongoing orthographic transformation. The Seattle Times and the Boston Globe changed their stylebooks last year. TIME, BuzzFeed News, Business Insider, HuffPost, andhave made the switch as well. The AP, though, sets the standard for a broad cross section of the mainstream journalism industry—including Slate, whose style guide defaults to the AP.
The old AP style was confounding to me when I started writing for my college newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel. I’d always capitalized Black in my personal and academic writings, because it made sense to do so. As a Black woman, I viewed Blackness as a cohesive culture, and the lowercase B looked wrong sitting beside other, capitalized racial and ethnic identifiers.
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