So I’m sitting at my computer, working on a book review of It Was Never About A Hot Dog and a Coke!—which, coincidentally you should never read because it’s horrifically written—and I’m irritated because the author keeps capitalizing the word “black” when it’s used to describe a group of people, but doesn’t capitalize the word “white” when it’s used to describe a group of people. This strikes me, at the very least, as a rather glaring grammatical inconsistency that some proofreader should have caught, or, at the very worst, weirdly racist.

But I didn’t live through the Civil Rights Movement, so I thought I should look up some background information on the issue, which I was guessing had probably been discussed as much as the he/she issue or the chairman/woman/person shit.

So I go to Google and start to type “Why capitalize “black” when used to describe a race?” I got as far as “Why capitali-” and stopped, because Google had made one of its automatic “Is this what you’re trying to type?” suggestions, and it was: “Why capitalism works in the West.” Thanks, Google, but fuck off.

For those of you curious about the grammar issue in question, AP style is to capitalize neither “black” nor “white” when referring to people, though people who choose to capitalize “black” and not “white” have this to say:

The word “Black” is used around the world to describe people who have “racial” features indicating African ancestry. Please keep in mind that the convention of race has been discarded by science-genetically we are all one race, and the human-genome project proves we are all from Africa.

“Black” is also accepted by many Black people as an inoffensive description. It is a generalized description and can be supplemented by another description such as Black Canadian, Black African American, Nigerian American or Black Latino. However, many Black people describe themselves simply as being “Black,” and this reality is reflected in a body of literature, music and academic study.

I do not believe “white” needs to be capitalized because people in the white majority don’t think of themselves in that way. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this–it’s just how it is. The exception is white supremacists who have a definite vision for what “white” means. Most American white people describe themselves in more defined terms, such as Irish American or Jewish. I will make the point that African Americans (descendents of slaves) cannot define themselves more accurately than an entire continent because their ancestry was obliterated by the practices of enslavers, which included breaking apart tribal and family bonds.

(www.diversityinc.com)

Fascinating, if not at times wishy-washy argument for capitalization, the last argument being the most poignant and inarguable. But the obsessive compulsive ex-proofreader in me still wants to side with AP.