AP Style’s Racial Capitalization Debate: Not So Black and white
Just as we thought 2020 couldn’t get any worse, news of the May 25 police killing of George Floyd spread as fast as, well, the coronavirus, reminding us that fixing racism is no easy task. The silver lining of all this turned out to be renewed public awareness toward Black Lives Matter, protests, and the ethics of policing.
It also prompted one of the most challenging discussions about inclusive language of our time, and the most necessary.
On June 19, the Associated Press Stylebook, a leading authority on grammar, style, and usage in newswriting, announced on their website that they would capitalize Black “in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense.” They also promised to get back to readers on whether “white” would get the same treatment.
Long story short, the AP decided one month later to lowercase “white,” and the internet spontaneously combusted.
But this is not your average social media dumpster fire. Shockingly, criticism against the AP had bipartisan support on Twitter and Facebook, both from the expected white dude crying foul about reverse discrimination and the unexpected social justice advocate who disagreed for much less obvious reasons.
Even weirder is how other style guides are capitalizing “white.” While The New York Times, Buzzfeed and Wall Street Journal support capitalizing Black and lowercasing white, proponents for capitalizing both Black and White include Chicago style, AMA style, APA style, The Diversity Style Guide, the Conscious Style Guide, and the National Association of Black Journalists.
Pay special attention to those last four. AP’s update ostensibly seems like the obvious choice for people and organizations in the social justice sphere, but if that’s the case, why then didn’t four of the leading organizations fighting for language diversity support AP’s decision and update their own styles accordingly? Why did the AP make the decision it did, and was it the right choice?
I’m coming at this question with five years of editing experience and a bachelor’s degree in English, where I had extensive coursework in writing, editing, rhetoric, and linguistics. Currently I’m working on an MA in composition theory and researching best practices for inclusivity in writing and editing. My semi-professional opinion, therefore, is that there is no good choice. There are so many confounding linguistic and ethnographic variables that go into the question of capitalizing “white” that either ruling will create undesired side effects.
Thus, the question becomes this: Which choice leads to the most inclusive outcome with the least damaging side effects? And the answer is that the AP Stylebook editor Paula Froke developed a chronic drinking problem after coping with the most stressful June ever. (Not really.)
Let’s unpack this.
Whiteness: Does It Culture?
Alongside their update, the AP released a blog post explaining their decision in detail, tackling the most complicated question first: If we’re to capitalize cultural designations, then “white” must be a culture to get the proper noun treatment. But what even is “white culture,” and does such a culture exist?
This turns out to be a contentious debate in cultural anthropology, sociolinguistics, and a handful of other disciplines. Here, the AP presents the debate by posing a set of three criteria that determines whether something is a legitimate “culture.”
For Black people, the AP argues that they have a strong sense of 1) shared “cultural commonalities,” 2) shared “historical commonalities,” and 3) even though there are separate Black communities in, for example, America, France, and Jamaica, they all share the experience of being discriminated against for their skin color. Therefore, it is capitalized.
White people, however, “generally do not share the same history and culture, or the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color.” Additionally, the AP expressed concern with inadvertently “conveying legitimacy” to white supremacist groups.
This is a fair concern — those against designating whiteness as a culture note that “white culture” is a recent development, and perhaps an arbitrarily woven tapestry of unrelated European countries then used as a call to action by white supremacist groups to “retake Constantinople,” as the meme goes, and establish the white ethno-state.
At the same time, others have put forth compelling claims that a white culture may exist, raising the point that white Americans are frequently six, seven, or even eight generations departed from their original heritage culture. These Americans tend to speak in regional American dialects that Chicano or AAVE speakers might refer to as a “white accent,” and due to the three-generation model of linguistic assimilation, third-generation immigrants and beyond are unlikely to be fluent in their heritage language.
In addition to language and dialect, there are other American cultural practices dominantly (but not necessarily entirely) practiced by white people, such as being a fan of “Friends,” having a lowkey addiction to Starbucks lattes and gently weeping at The Star-Spangled Banner in reverence to “The American Dream.”
More aptly, white culture is Karen shouting at “Steve,” the friendly multilingual Pakistani customer service rep, to either “learn English” or transfer her to someone with an “acceptable” accent. It’s also overlooking the most qualified candidate for the job who’s Black because they “wouldn’t fit in with the workplace culture.”
If this interpretation holds true, a shared experience of being historical oppressors, along with a handful of shared pastimes with debatable degrees of benign-ness, is an undercurrent within white culture, and this is what makes the decision to capitalize or not a painful one.
The Conscious Style Guide weighed in on Facebook by sharing a Washington Post opinion piece arguing that we must capitalize “white” to accurately represent — and hold accountable — a long history of racism “whose privileges should be embedded in its definition.”
If the AP decides that white is a culture and should be capitalized, they “convey legitimacy” to bigots, and if they decide that white isn’t a culture and lowercase, they’re downplaying or outright ignoring the cultural role of whiteness in perpetuating racism.
Both interpretations are persuasive, and no matter how nuanced the AP could get in justifying either choice, a mere capitalization rule can’t hold that much meaning without an external context most readers will never see.
Advocacy vs Markedness: A Devil’s Deal
The AP’s second point concerns the use of capitalization as advocacy, a somewhat rare phenomenon used by religious people capitalizing the “Him” in God, by copywriters when playing up the importance of some mundane product or service and, unfortunately, by racist people deliberately capitalizing “white” and lowercasing “Black” to feel better about themselves.
These rules seldom enter wider language use — good luck find atheists who capitalize “Him,” and nowhere outside of advertising will an “Outdoor Marlow Seat/Back Chair Cushion” be considered regal enough to escape its fate as a common noun. But that doesn’t mean capitalizing “white” as a show of superiority isn’t dangerous, and clearly the AP felt normalizing this practice was too great a risk to justify a capitalization rule.
And they’re potentially right — it’s possible white supremacists might exploit an AP-endorsed capitalized “White” to sneak dog whistles outside of the fringe corners of 4chan and into standard writing, but at the same time, we need to understand the historical and linguistic moment that racist stylization came from.
Before now, most writing lowercased “Black,” and that made it possible for bigots to exploit that difference. Fortunately now that “Black” is capitalized, they won’t be able to do this anymore, and over time this should become a nonissue. If the AP had capitalized, context still matters from article to article, and nonracist capitalization would have buried that racist stylization out of usage. Unfortunately, that opens the door for dog-whistling, but it also closes the door for macroagression.
Moreover, not capitalizing “white” may have created another issue, one that the AP references, but doesn’t elaborate on, that if we don’t capitalize, “we are implying that white is the default.”
Specifically, I’m going to argue that this describes what the linguists call marked language, and it occurs with two counterpart words when one word is considered common or “unmarked” and the other is considered unusual or “marked.” Typically, this applies to affixes like “actor” and “actress” or adjective antonyms like “pure” and “corrupt.” “Black and white” ordinarily have a marked relationship as well which capitals could amplify.
But in this case, a capital letter is an unusual form of markedness, but it takes on many of the same characteristics and outcomes. Capitalization isn’t usually marked, but we’re in a situation where the AP capitalized “Black,” emphasized it and left the world waiting for a month. This acknowledged, to not capitalize it may have created a binary opposition in meaning, where “Black” was emphasized and “white” was left common, worryingly to be seen as default.
There’s tons of interesting linguistics research on markedness as it applies to perpetuating stigmas toward women, in that marked words like “policewoman” can normalize perceptions of the male as norm and male as superior, which in turn plays a role in gender stereotyping, self-concept, and our expectations of others.
Fortunately, capitalizing “Black” and lowercasing “white” is a very new trend and lacks the centuries-long social conditioning that sexist language has created, so it’s entirely possible that a marked “Black” won’t result in negative stereotyping. Alternatively, our existing biases of Black as other might lead larger society to adopt further unwanted stereotypes. It’s hard to tell what will happen at this point.
What Do?
After my scathing critique of the AP’s decision, you’d think this is the point where I say they’re problematic and must be stopped at all costs, but nah. I mean, yes, capitalizing both seems slightly better. But the thing that makes this capitalization conundrum so interesting — and frustrating — is that any productive decision we make in the goal of language inclusivity comes with an opposite problem. Since there is no perfect solution, what’s the best damage control?
The AP was in an impossible situation. Capitalizing “Black” was a wise choice, but one that couldn’t have happened without discussing “white” and opening Pandora’s Box. The AP made a hard decision, presenting reasonable justifications and making sacrifices.
Until we get tangible language data and see the outcomes for ourselves, this will remain a controversial decision for some time as thinkers pose competing but similarly plausible theories. If more of us framed the debate this way, we’d come at this issue with more respect and sensitivity.
Nothing about this issue is simple, but hopefully we can work together and find the best solution.
A shortened version of this article was originally published on The Advance-Titan.
