At the Amsterdam News, we’ve capitalized the B in Black for decades. When major news organizations refused to refer to our community with respect, we took the lead in capitalizing B and making certain our readers knew we were writing about a community that deserves to be recognized.
It was only in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in 2020 that the journalism industry’s most influential style guide, the Associated Press, decided that it would also begin capitalizing the Black B, decades after the AmNews and other Black newspapers had done so and advocated for the change.
“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 AP stated in its June 2020 decision. “The lowercase black is a color, not a person.”
We’ve been having ongoing conversations in the Amsterdam News newsroom about also capitalizing the B for Brown. Similarly to the old argument against capitalizing the B in Black, major news organizations do not capitalize the B in Brown because they say it does not efficiently describe a distinct community. They say Brown could refer to people who span the Caribbean islands, Central America and South America, the Middle East, Southern Asia, and sometimes even the Indigenous community, which are all culturally unique.
By that logic, we could disqualify the capitalizing of the B in Black. The United States has native African Americans, but our B in Black also refers to the collective weight of the diaspora in different geographic locations: Immigrants from Jamaica, Haiti, Nigeria, Ethiopia, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, Colombia, and other locations are part of the African diaspora. All of these Black people have assorted cultural peculiarities, but we are all African diasporan, all Black—and all treated as Black in U.S. society, which centered white supremacy from the onset.
The Amsterdam News centers Black voices. We provide news coverage of all Black people.
We find that clear writing indicates to our readers whom we are talking about when we also capitalize the B in Brown. Our coverage tends to look at issues that affect Black and Brown communities: Our readers know whom we are talking about when we write that descriptive phrase.
When we capitalize Brown, we are honoring and respecting a community as we name it.
From now on, when we write about Black and Brown community issues, it will always be with an uppercase B.