The Los Angeles Times, NBC News, MSNBC, BuzzFeed and the McClatchy newspaper chain have also moved to capitalize the word. In the 1980s, Jesse Jackson led a campaign to standardize “African American,” which had long been used in scholarly circles to emphasize a connection to the continent. Lowercase black is simply a color,” wrote Tharps, a journalism professor at Temple University. NABJ recommends capitalizing “whenever a color is used to appropriately describe a race.” One concern is that white supremacists often capitalize “white” in their literature. ADTharps added: “With everybody claiming publicly that they respect ‘Black Lives,’ then why don’t you respect them enough to capitalize the B in ‘Black’?”

Source: Washington Post June 18, 2020 22:45 UTC