Some thoughts on reverential capitalization
I work for a large multinational company, so big that it’s in the upper quadrant of the Fortune 500. It’s involved in an industry where, up until a decade ago, I’d have struggled to politicize its operations even if someone paid me to do so.
The other day I was reading the company’s in-house writing style guide and came across an entry relating to the capitalization of the word ‘black’ when referring to people of sub-Saharan African ancestry. Prima facie, capitalizing black in the context of race doesn’t seem such a bad idea. Population geneticists often refer to black people as ‘African’ and white people as ‘European’, but these labels make some people uncomfortable for whatever reason, so if we’re going to refer to major races as white, black, Native American, Asian, and Polynesian, maybe it makes sense to capitalize ‘white’ and ‘black’ when referring to white people and black people, even if just for the sake of consistency.
Such an approach was not what the style guide suggested. Instead, it recommended capitalizing black and continuing to write white with a lower case ‘w’. So far, so weird. The company I work for didn’t come up with this stuff. Their style guide basically follows that of the Associated Press (AP), who decided on this policy back in 2020. Their rationalization for the decision is quite interesting.
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 first thing that struck me is how Americentric the statement is. Black Americans descended from slaves (or American Descendants of Slavery [ADOS]) undeniably have a shared sense of history, identity and community. Genetically speaking the overwhelming majority of ADOS have origins in West Africa, although that region is extremely diverse (there are hundreds of ethnic groups in Nigeria alone), and many ADOS today have some European and/or Native American ancestry. Despite the brevity of their time together in North America, however, most would agree that ADOS are indeed an identifiable and unique ethnic group.
Things get more complex when considering black Americans who arrived after slavery was abolished, and especially after the Civil Rights Act of 1964: the history shared by ADOS simply doesn’t apply to black people who arrived in the US after 1964. What does their “shared sense of history” constitute if not a collective memory of everything from kidnap, slavery, civil war, emancipation, blues, jazz, and civil rights protests?
One of the great puzzles of American politics over the last quarter century (for me, anyway) was the near-universal acceptance of Barack Obama as African American in the same way Martin Luther King or Frederick Douglass were African American. Barack Obama’s election as the first black president was celebrated so exuberantly because it was viewed as the end of a long journey for black Americans: their ancestors arrived in chains, but hundreds of years later one of them was now sitting in the White House as the most powerful man on earth.
You can understand why this might be a meaningful and emotional event for someone with an elementary understanding of race and human history: Obama is black, I’m black. The color of your skin determines your race, therefore he’s one of us. But that’s not how this works. The reverential capitalization of ‘black’ signifies that the rules of language are being changed based on the idea of a “shared sense of history” that doesn’t exist. When Rosa Parks refused to vacate her seat on the bus that fateful day in December 1955, Barack Obama’s father was living under British colonial rule in Kenya, recently married to a local woman in a tribal ceremony. Barack Obama Sr. was a member of the Luo, a Nilo-Semitic ethnic group. The East African Luo are genetically more distinct from the West Africans who comprise American descendants of slaves than Spanish people are from Koreans, thanks largely to the impenetrability of the continental interior that kept East and West Africans apart for so long. Obama’s mother, of course, was a white American of predominantly English stock.
What is the “shared sense of history, identity and community” that unites Obama and ADOS like Miles Davis and Toni Morrison? Beyond skin tone, there is none. Obama is racially half-European so perhaps it’s a bit of a straw-man to use him as an example, but even if both his parents were Nilo-Semitic Kenyans he would be genetically more distinct from ADOS than ADOS are from white Americans due to commingling between foundational whites and black slaves during shared centuries in North America. Most of the discourse surrounding Obama’s race centered on whether he was black or mixed race, but very little considered that his East African ancestry means he shares no blood ties whatsoever with ADOS. And his father’s arrival in the country was so late in the country’s history that Elvis Presley was already an established pop star, meaning Obama Jr. shares no cultural ties with ADOS either, except maybe in the sense that his white mother was actually living in the US during the civil rights movement.
The AP goes on:
After a review and period of consultation, we found, at this time, less support for capitalizing white. White people generally do not share the same history and culture, or the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color.
This is a strange argument, riddled with logical inconsistencies. They say that “white people generally do not share the same history and culture”, but the fact that AP can use the phrase ‘white people’ to describe a specific group of humans and everyone knows who they’re talking about perhaps highlights a lack of rigor in their thought process. Beyond all that, the simple fact is that white people are genetically very similar. All people of European origin, and that obviously includes white Americans, descend from a relatively small number of people who left Africa about 50,000 years ago.
Until the 1500s, a vanishingly small number of Europeans had ever left their ancestral homeland, but their forebears lived and died on a continent that had a common religion (Europe was called Christendom for a reason); modeled much of its learning on Ancient Greek philosophy; took inspiration from the Roman Empire in everything from engineering to the law; and shared in the experience of countless other events over the centuries ranging from the Battle of Tours in 732 and the establishment of the universities to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The AP claims white people don’t share a history or culture, but the exact opposite is true: Europe’s relatively compact size and the proliferation of significant ideas thanks to the printing press resulted in white people being considerably more alike than Africans are, as demonstrated by the countless languages and religions that characterize the dark continent. By contrast, Washington DC is dotted with Greco-Roman architecture and populated by politicians speaking English while partaking in a European form of government precisely because of the commonalities white people share.
The last clause in this paragraph is telling, as it reflects the insular worldview of Americans who are often comically ignorant when it comes to the world outside their own borders. Black people were once discriminated in the US because of skin color (actually they were discriminated against because of their race, of which skin color is merely a proxy, though that’s an essay for another day), but millions upon millions living in Africa have never experienced discrimination based on their skin color and never will. Even if every black person living outside Africa has experienced racial discrimination, how is that something an accountant in Addis Ababa or taxi driver in Accra would ever understand? It reminds me of that old joke about the American arriving at an African airport and marveling at the number of minorities around the place.
A lot of weird things have occurred during the culture wars, but few are as oddly passive aggressive towards white people as this one. Reverential capitalization traditionally was “the practice of capitalizing religious words that refer to deities or divine beings in cases where the words would not otherwise have been capitalized”. Nothing sums up the frenzied religious irrationality of modern progressivism on the subject of race better than that.