"Why We’re Capitalizing Black/The Times has changed its style on the term’s usage to better reflect a shared cultural identity." - Hallo friend USA IN NEWS, In the article you read this time with the title "Why We’re Capitalizing Black/The Times has changed its style on the term’s usage to better reflect a shared cultural identity.", we have prepared well for this article you read and download the information therein. hopefully fill posts Article HOT, Article NEWS, we write this you can understand. Well, happy reading.

Title : "Why We’re Capitalizing Black/The Times has changed its style on the term’s usage to better reflect a shared cultural identity."
link : "Why We’re Capitalizing Black/The Times has changed its style on the term’s usage to better reflect a shared cultural identity."

"Why We’re Capitalizing Black/The Times has changed its style on the term’s usage to better reflect a shared cultural identity."

The NYT explains its policy change. I assume the answer is: We're doing it because it's something we can do, and we want to do something.

It makes me think of the phrase: I wouldn't lift my little finger to help you. By pushing the shift key when typing the "B," they are, at least, lifting their little finger...

But are they helping? Are people with this characteristic helped by a gesture that says — or is supposed to say — you have a shared cultural identity with the other people who have the same characteristic?

Let's read the argument. First, the Times tells us that before 1930, it used the word "negro" — uncapitalized — to refer to black people, and W.E.B. Du Bois led a campaign to demand capitalization, writing that "The use of a small letter for the name of twelve million Americans and two hundred million human beings is a personal insult."

There's no link to the full text of the letter, and I tried to find it. I'd like to know whether Du Bois's argument included the fact that the word for white people — perhaps "Caucasian" — was capitalized. If so, his name and eminent reputation are misappropriated in the argument today, when the word for white people is "white," and it is not capitalized. The "insult" back then would have been in denying black people equal treatment, whereas the decision today is about giving them distinctive attention.

“We believe this style best conveys elements of shared history and identity, and reflects our goal to be respectful of all the people and communities we cover,” said Dean Baquet, The Times’s executive editor, and Phil Corbett, associate managing editor for standards, in a memo to staff....

“It seems like such a minor change, black versus Black,” The Times’s National editor, Marc Lacey, said. “But for many people the capitalization of that one letter is the difference between a color and a culture.”

That raises the question why it is good to assign individuals to a culture. The color/culture distinction is a bit like the sex/gender distinction. Shouldn't each individual control his or her association with a culture? Why would a newspaper, supposedly dedicated to factual reporting, routinely attach a culture to a person because of their color?

Lacey says, "Some have been pushing for this change for years." So, one answer is: We're responding to demands. So, if "some" — the right "some"? — demand that the capitalization be abandoned, the NYT will do that too? A lot of demands are being made these days. Did the NYT ask the entire black "culture" what they wanted or is it following its own "culture" and satisfying demands?\

“We don’t treat the stylebook as an instrument of activism; we don’t view it as at the vanguard of language,” Mr. Abrams said. “We generally want the stylebook to reflect common usage.”...

“Some have been pushing for this change for years,” Mr. Lacey said. “They consider Black like Latino and Asian and Native American, all of which are capitalized. Others see the change as a distraction from more important issues. Then there are those troubled that our policy will now capitalize ‘Black’ but not ‘white.’ Over all, the view was that there was a growing agreement in the country to capitalize and that The Times should not be a holdout.”

The NYT doesn't want to be the last to go along with this demand. That's the argument Lacey hastens to make right after noting the strongest argument against capitalization — that "white" isn't capitalized. Does he have an answer to that argument? Is it that "black" is a culture and "white" isn't?

Or is it that if "white" is a culture, it's a culture of supremacy and the idea must be to break it down, not give it more solidity? I wrote that question before reading this last part:

The Times also looked at whether to capitalize white and brown in reference to race, but both will remain lowercase. Brown has generally been used to describe a wide range of cultures, Mr. Baquet and Mr. Corbett said in their memo to staff. As a result, its meaning can be unclear to readers; white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does, and also has long been capitalized by hate groups.

Thus articles "Why We’re Capitalizing Black/The Times has changed its style on the term’s usage to better reflect a shared cultural identity."

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