Why I'm not happy with the AP's decision to support capitalizing "black."

[Celerity]

8. this is a 6 year old story

We are today making an important change to AP style that stems from a long and fruitful conversation among news leaders, editors and diverse members of our staff and external groups and organizations.

https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/announcements/the-decision-to-capitalize-black/

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. As a global news organization, we are continuing to discuss within the U.S. and internationally whether to capitalize the term white. Considerations are many and include any implications that doing so might have outside the United States. We continue to discuss other terms, including minorities and people of color, as well as the term “Black, Indigenous and people of color.” Our revisions come after more than two years of in-depth research and discussion with colleagues and respected thinkers from a diversity of backgrounds, both within and from outside the cooperative. The updates become part of the AP Stylebook’s race-related coverage guidance, which begins:



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