![]() White would remain lower case while brown, which is used in reference to people of unrelated racial and ethnic backgrounds around the globe based on their skin colour, would continue to only be used in direct quotes. “I believe it is very much an American issue and the danger is that the power of social media has created an echo chamber in which there is pressure to conform rather than critically looking at an issue or looking at it from a truly international perspective”.Ī police officer patrols during a protest in support of the Black lives matter movement in New York on July 09, 2016. “I still see no justification of capital B for blacks and not capital W for whites, if the argument is the said ‘shared culture or shared experience’”. Getting foreign readers to see that ‘Africa is not a country’ is an important part of our daily work, and lumping the struggles of black people here, with those of black people in America or elsewhere, would be a step backward, a step towards further erasing the diversity of black people and of Africans in particular”. “ You have people of entirely different cultures, who look different, who speak many, many different languages. I strongly feel that referring to Black as a culture will, in the long run, build and embolden general stereotypes about Africans”. “ I am black, but I have a different culture from black people elsewhere - be it in the West or in Africa. Other reactions from AFP’s African staff included: Others felt it was wrong to place members of an extremely diverse racial and ethnic population into what one staffer described as a “soup of blackness”.Īlexis kneels with his baby at a protest in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement in Dakar on J(AFP / John Wessels) When it came to the internal consultation within AFP, there was an initial consensus in favour, although some of our staff felt it was a particularly North American issue. So unlike other important changes in journalistic style there was no global adoption of capitalisation of black. In other English-language media markets the style also remained lower case, although editors would usually keep the upper case “B” when using stories from news agencies that had made the change. In Britain, most media stayed with lowercase black, although some had, and still have, no consistent style and drifted between upper and lower case. ![]() (AFP / Brendan Smialowski)įirst, it became evident very quickly that few, if any, media outside of North America were adopting the change. Kamala Harris, flanked by husband Doug Emhoff, is sworn in as the 49th US Vice President by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on January 20, 2021, at the US Capitol in Washington, DC. I took a two-pronged approach – seeing what other English-language media did outside of North America and consulting with AFP editors and bureaus to see what the feeling was on the ground, including, and crucially, in Africa itself. But what about media in the rest of the world? The message from the media in the United States, and also in Canada, was clear – black should be capitalised. Then she went to a Black university in a Black city. Kamala Harris grew up in a mostly White world. Some news outlets adopted Black as their style for their worldwide coverage, including in Africa itself. Major media quickly adopted the change including The Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post and Bloomberg. Capitalisation of black was seen as recognising the shared identity, history and culture of black people. My first instinct was to propose that AFP join with other media in making the change globally – it made editorial sense and was appropriate given the social context and the renewed reckoning on race.Ī black man and a white woman hold their hands up in a front of police officers in downtown Long Beach in New Zealand on during a protest against the death of George Floyd (AFP/ Apu Gomes) ![]() That immediately raised the question of whether AFP, an international news agency based in Paris with a substantial editorial presence in North America, should do the same. Now, as Kamala Harris becomes the first woman and person of colour to hold the office of vice president, Stylebook editor Eric Wishart looks back at how the agency made its decision on the capitalisation of Black.Īs a former editor-in-chief now responsible for special editorial projects, who wrote the ethics code and recently updated the AFP Stylebook, the responsibility fell to me to make a recommendation to the Agency’s news management. ![]() Following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 and the subsequent protests against police brutality, there was widespread adoption in the US media of capitalised Black to refer to African Americans and other members of the African diaspora. ![]()
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