Touching Racism and the Terms We Use
By Chad A. B. Wilson
Published May 3, 2007, 2:50 pm in Rhetoric.
Normally, I don't like to touch racial issues. They're tricky, and I find myself getting into jams when I didn't mean to or even really know what I was doing in the first place. I don't think I'm a racist, mind you, and I try very hard not to be racist, but sometimes I say stupid things that may be interpreted in ways I didn't mean for them to be. Like right now: all of you think I'm a racist. I can say I am not all I want, and it just sounds like I'm in denial. So I'll drop that. Now you see why I don't like to touch these racial topics...
With that lack of a racial caveat, I want to talk about a newspaper I picked up at my child's daycare, which is run by a prominent black church. The newspaper is called "Houston Defender: Houston's Leading Black Newspaper." There's a blurb about it at the Handbook of Texas Online that says,
"HOUSTON DEFENDER. The Houston Defender, a weekly black newspaper, was established in Houston on October 11, 1930. In November 1930 the paper was newly published from the Odd Fellows Temple, had a larger format, and was headed by president H. P. Carter. In the 1940s the paper was edited and published by C. F. Richardson. In this period the paper espoused a platform supporting new parks and paved streets, space restrictions on rental housing, separation of Prairie View from Texas A&M University, increased black representation in police and fire departments, more sensitive curricula for the Houston public schools and a technical high school, county institutions for delinquents, equal rights, voting rights, anti-lynching laws, capital punishment, and an increase in black-owned businesses. The paper has been in continuous publication since its founding."
That's impressive, and I had no idea this newspaper even existed until I picked up this copy. I thoroughly enjoyed it, to say the least, and it even helped clear up a couple things about Texas Southern University that I was having trouble understanding. One thing struck me as I was reading it, however. One article on the front page claimed, "Educated Black women abused more than others." The article, which was fascinating, said this:
"The study included data compiled from more than 55,000 Black, white and Hispanic women and took two years to complete."
I had to reread it to make sure my eyes were not deceiving me, but there it was: "Black, white and Hispanic." It made me think about that old Sesame Street-style game, which one of these is not like the other? For some reason, the word "white" here gets the literal short shrift. To make sure it wasn't a mistake, I scanned the rest of the article and found the word "Black" repeatedly capitalized. So maybe not capitalizing the word "white" was a careless error. After all, the spellcheck certainly won't tell you to capitalize it! But then I searched the rest of the newspaper and found an article inside the magazine that included this:
"Frailey could--or should we say will--need some Black support to be successful. That's because even though the white trustees have faith in him, you can be assured that the good ole boys won't roll out the red carpet."
As if that were not confusing enough, a previous sentence said, "In addition, the district is only nine percent Black, which doesn't make African Americans a strong political force." Glancing through, the terms "Black" and "African American" are used interchangeably.
The newspaper obviously uses the term "Black" most of the time, although it occasionally intersperses a few "African Americans" in there. This interchangeability is key, I think, because it points out how this newspaper does not have clear editorial guidelines. Whether there is a political agenda, it doesn't necessarily focus on the terms themselves. They're not making a statement about which term to use, after all: Black or African American, they're all the same. At first I thought that perhaps "Black" was used as an adjective and "African American" as a noun, but nope. They're all used every way. So there's no argument that the terms are really all that important here.
But then there is that capitalized "B" in "Black." I had honestly never seen it before, but it made sense to me. Why not capitalize it? There's actually some debate about whether to capitalize these words, and most journalists seem to advocate the capital letters, but tradition says that they are not capitalized. There's a great article on this issue by Aly Colon at www.poynter.org called "Black, black, or African American?" There, Colon says that the capital letter says that these are a people. I like that. We capitalize "Hispanic," after all, so why not capitalize "Black"?
But to purposely NOT capitalize "White" is wrong.
I can think of several reasons why they would choose not to capitalize the word "white." One is that "white" does not denote a people. "White" is simply a color of skin and nothing holds those people together other than their whiteness. Isn't this true of Black, too? Doesn't Black merely refer to the color of one's skin?
Two is that because White only refers to the color of one's skin, those people are said to be Italian, British, Polish, etc., even though they're still White. Yes, that's true, but isn't it also true of Blacks? Many Blacks could be further subdivided by national origin, too: Nigerians, Jamaicans, etc. What about the descendents of slaves, though? How do we label them? Well, we really can't, I guess. But aren't a lot of whites the same way? sure, we may be from "Europe," but I know my family can't trace its history at all, and we're all a mix-mash, anyway. So what do we do with these mixes? We call them all White.
The third reason, which is the only one that makes any sense at all is that the newspaper is trying to empower Black people. It's trying to say that Blacks are a cohesive group that should stick together, and they are known collectively as "Blacks." It is a color that has become an ethnicity that has become a nationality.
Why not "White"? Because Whites don't need it. Whites already have all the power, so they don't need to stick together. They don't need to have that cohesiveness that Blacks need. Or else they don't deserve it.
Now I'm sensitive to this argument. I can never really understand the way Whites held down Blacks for so long and continue to do it in a myriad of ways. I know this history of subjugation that continues today. It's reprehensible.
But not giving the term "White" the same respect as the term "Black" is a form of racism. It's perpetuating the stereotype of an us versus them mentality that is counterproductive and even destructive. When I read that in a newspaper, I think that the newspaper hates "Whites" and wants to put them in a lower position, elevating even the term "Black" above the term "White." And that unnerves me.
So let's give even the terms we use some thought. Capitalize the term "Black" if you want--that makes sense--but don't capitalize "Black" and leave "white" lowercase. After all, can you imagine if a newspaper did that the other way around? I would call them white supremacists...or simply racists.
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