The Associated Press recently updated its style guide so that "Black" as in " Black people" should now be capitalized. ^[1] Should we apply those same changes to our MoS? Should similar racial terms, such as " White" be capitalized as well? – LaundryPizza03 ( d c̄) 05:30, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

LaundryPizza03, Where is this discussion taking place? I could not locate a link to it. Thanks. FULBERT ( talk) 15:24, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

The problem I've always had with this is that it raises the specter of capitalizing White, which has been used ... um ... problematically at times. E Eng 19:02, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

The AP announcement is here. A discussion of the appropriateness of writing Black but not White is here. I think it's too soon to propose a change in the guideline, the announcement is only two days old. Peter Gulutzan ( talk) 19:42, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

And the AP hasn't yet determined whether to capitalize "white" as a racial designation. Dhtwiki ( talk) 22:37, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

Has this been resolved? Swiftestcat ( talk) 03:48, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

I don't think we need to wait. Capital B has already become the standard at a number of media organizations and publishers, AP is a bit late to the game and it is already commonly used in Wikipedia article - there is just a lack of consistency that needs to be rectified. Capitalizing "W" in white is non-standard as the usage is different, Black people are a self-identified (and externally identified) ethnic group or people. White people remain more likely to identify themselves either as European or by a particular ethnicity eg English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh (or British), French, German, Italian, Russian etc. This may change and if "White" becomes more widespread we may need to revisit that. See for instance this explanation from the Columbia Journalism Review: "we capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms. For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists." 104.247.241.28 ( talk) 13:43, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

The fact that there are "white supremacists" means that there are certainly those who self-identify, or are identified by others, as "white" (as if that wasn't the case all along); and the particular sin at the white supremacist websites seems to be that they write "White" while writing "black", the mirror image of what we would do here if we were to capitalize one but not the other, especially if the practice is made inflexible. I know of at least one article, White Latin Americans that does it both ways within the article but is not inconsistent within sections ("white" and "black" or "White" and "Black" within sentences, paragraphs, and sections). Dhtwiki ( talk) 04:57, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

It does not matter what AP does. What matters is what the majority of RSs do. MOS:CAPS: "Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization ... only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia." –  Finnusertop ( talk ⋅ contribs) 15:00, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose per WP:NPOV. Do it for all or do it for none, and the Wikipedia standard is for none. Elizium23 ( talk) 05:14, 27 June 2020 (UTC)
  • Except that's not what NPOV means on Wikipedia. See #Note, below. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 18:18, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
• Leaning oppose pending more staying power in these sources. If we do decide to do this we need to do it for all races per NPOV. – John M Wolfson ( talk • contribs) 06:53, 27 June 2020 (UTC)
• Another source: Eligon, John (June 26, 2020). "A Debate Over Identity and Race Asks, Are African-Americans 'Black' or 'black'?". The New York Times. ISSN  0362-4331. czar 03:22, 29 June 2020 (UTC)
• Comments about the term "Black" specifically should absolutely not provide precedent either way for other race descriptors, for the same reason (B/b)lack nationalism is not an "equal but opposite" ideology to white nationalism. — Bilorv ( talk) 00:17, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

  Bilorv, it doesn't look opposite; both look to be cut from the same cloth. Elizium23 ( talk) 00:25, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

  @ Elizium23: Maybe research a bit more and listen to some people of both persuasions, and then answer the question of where and when violence will be necessary to reach the goals of each of the two ideologies. One is a group who aim to end racist violence and another who aim to perpetuate it. The movements have intransigently different histories behind them. — Bilorv ( talk) 00:31, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

  More to the topic at hand, if we capitalize "Black" then we capitalize "White" and ... I guess "Latino" and "Asian" are done for us already; it would seem that some are intent on ghettoizing whiteness. Elizium23 ( talk) 00:41, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

  Bilorv, you're making a self-contradictory, fallacious argument. In one breath you are arguing that "Black" and "White", "Black nationalism" and "White nationalism", etc., are a false equivalence while simultaneously engaging in the false equivalence of ethno-socio-political groups, histories, and movements on the one hand, with on the other hand typography of metaphorico-descriptive labels in neutral encyclopedic coverage. This is like arguing that because we think Pol Pot was a bad guy, he should be written "pol pot", and because environmentalism is a good cause it should be written "Environmentalism". Wikipedia and language do not work that way.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:15, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

The NYT now uppercases "Black". More detail on that decision and the request by the immediate past president of the National Association of Black Journalists:

I think it'd be worth making this a formal RfC now. (not watching, please {{ ping}}) czar 01:48, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

NYT does not now consistently uppercase "Black" [1]. They just permit it to be capitalized (alone or with "White", "Brown") in op-eds and other opinion pieces, and they capitalize the entire name "Black Lives Matter", same as they do with "Occupy Wall Street" and other named movements. They may have, early on, announced an intention to follow AP on this, but they are not actually doing it, probably due to objections, though I doubt they'll be very clear about why they're quietly backing off from it.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:52, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

@ SMcCandlish: check your dates. The NYT's editors' note was published on June 30, five days after the op-ed you linked to. The decision to capitalize "Black" in this context was announced in the paper itself on July 5. Since then, they do in fact use the uppercase "B", e.g. [2] [3] [4]. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 20:41, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Ah, I see. Well, it's just one publisher and isn't dispositive of what WP should do, nor what professional writers across English (and they style guides they follow and help shape) are doing. This "capitalize Black and that only" thing is a US-centric and highly politicized knee-jerk reaction to racist politics and racial-justice activism of the last 6 months or so, and is even counter to the broader language-usage reforms pushed by progressives for years (which would treat "Brown" and "White" the same way, and had already been gaining substantial traction and not just in the US – this is basically a conflict between multiple progressive/left factions what has not even been resolved in that sector yet, much less to a new global-English norm). Aside from the WP:POV and WP:SOAPBOX/ WP:ADVOCACY/ WP:GREATWRONGS problems (which also makes it a MOS:TONE issue) with WP adopting a "Black alone" position, whether that idea ever actually becomes accepted as a norm in English is a WP:CRYSTAL matter (and is frankly unlikely). Pushing for it ahead of its vast-majority-of-usage establishment is also pretty obviously a WP:RECENTISM failure. It's also a WP:CIRCULAR problem: we've already seen evidence many times that WP's own style choices end up having a strong effect on the blogosphere and even on mainstream publishers; e.g., over-capitalization of a subject on WP leads to a clearly observable spike in unnecessary capitalization of the same thing in other publications, which can be directly tracked with tools like Google Ngrams).

Anyway, NYT publishes (on a very slow cycle) its own style guide, which is widely divergent from others even in journalism, and has little effect on writing outside their own newsroom. While NYT is not quite as stylistically aberrant on so many things as The New Yorker (which says it gets more mail from readers about one of these quibbles than about any other subject!), it's still on that side of the fence; like The Economist and a few other publishers, they intentionally diverge from mainstream publishing norms as a means of branding/distinction. Not a single thing in MoS is based on NYT style, and MoS does not jump onto any style-shift bandwagons until they become norms reflected in the majority of the style guides that MoS is actually based on (Chicago, Hart's, Scientific Style and Format, Fowler's and Garner's), which is generally a 5–10 year shift cycle. This is why, e.g., WP was slow to adopt singular they vs. awkwardness like he/she or treating he as generic, a preference for US over U.S., and dropping the comma before Jr. or Sr. in a name, despite them already having become more common than the alternatives in mainstream writing.
 —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:42, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

So the NYT style was "good enough" for WP when it was lowercasing both, but now the NYT capitalizing "Black" is not dispositive of what we should do? Seems like you're arguing against yourself here. See my additional reply under #Extended discussion below. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 21:39, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

Many newsrooms are now capitalizing the B in Black. ^[1]

AP: The decision to capitalize Black. ^[2]

The NY Times: Why We’re Capitalizing Black. ^[3]

FOX News Media to capitalize 'Black'. ^[4]

Why hundreds of American newsrooms have started capitalizing the ‘b’ in ‘Black’. ^[5]

2600:1000:B031:3E57:C563:E6:7258:A121 ( talk)

"Many newsrooms" just assiduously follow AP Stylebook, and made this change the moment AP did, automatically (and are now trying to justify it to their readers, many of whom are understandably objecting). The entire AP Stylebook sphere is essentially a single source, and is questionably relevant at all on a style decision like this, because their choices on many things (including this one) do not align with other types and writing and publishing, which follow other style guides. Most importantly, WP is not written in news style, a matter of clear, formal policy, so "lots of newspapers do it and new style guides like it" is a useless argument in an MoS discussion. When most academic book publishers consistently do something and their style guides, like Chicago Manual of Style and New Hart's Rules (AKA New Oxford Style Manual), on which it MoS is primarily based, say also to do it, then there's a good argument for WP to do it.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:42, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

The Chicago Manual of Style now advises capitalizing "Black". See #Update below. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 01:18, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

• Comment For context on other similar terms: Note also that The New York Times explicitly does not capitalize "brown" or "white" but the AP are issuing a decision on "white" soon. Other sources are explicit about capitalizing "Black" but not "white" ( e.g.) but remain silent on other things capitalized by the AP such as "Indigenous". See also, e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/time-to-capitalize-blackand-white/613159/. If the RfC is narrowly about "B/black", then I don't think it's going to go anywhere as it will inevitably get derailed around "B/brown", "I/indigenous", "W/white", etc. Unfortunately, this is one of those times when you have to make the RfC more broad to get better responses. ― Justin (koavf)❤ T☮ C☺ M☯ 00:28, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose due to WP:NPOV. My first take was that we should follow English grammer, but that would leave us capitalizing African but not black and Caucasian but not white. I believe that if we make a change it should be to uniformly capitalize all "races" ^[a] and ethnicities. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul ( talk) 14:33, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
• This is a tough one in that these organizations are explicitly adopting terms because of non-neutrality; it's a situation where holding to style guides can arguably run afoul of NPOV. If the trend is to capitalize entire generic racial groups (Black people) versus specific ones (Asian-Americans) having certain ones be the only odd ones out seems wrong and less consistent from our standpoint of usage. (I'd also be hesitant to do anything that is a specifically NA phenomenon given how many issues we already have in preferring one set of idiosyncrasies and specific cultural norms that aren't representative.) Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 10:51, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

• Capitalize "Black" (no opinion on "White") for articles with MOS:TIES to American subjects. This is consistent with MOS:CAPS: only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.— Bagumba ( talk) 12:31, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose. As others have said, I feel uppercasing Black (and Brown) but not white would violate NPOV and is fairly controversial among scholars for various reasons. It's also a relatively new decision reached by the AP and other news outlets. -- Calidum 14:27, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
  • After some thought, I'm striking my previous opposition to this. -- Calidum 17:13, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
• Capitalize both, per WP:NPOV, WP:SOAPBOX, and because they are serving as proper names of ethnic groups, and because doing one without the other is linguistically senseless, and because this is largely an Americanism (see, e.g., The Guardian [5] [6], BBC News [7] [8], and The Conversation [9]), plus obviously an example of WP:RECENTISM. [My second choice would be "capitalize both, or neither, consistently in the article, and capitalize both in proximity to other ethno-racial terms like "Latino" and "Asian". Capitalizing one but not the other is just a WP:NPOV violation and is not permissible.]

  We have multiple newspapers of record telling us that the move to capitalize Black alone is political and polarized, and that these publications are doing it explicitly as socio-political messaging [10] [11]). BLM editorials using "Black" but "white" drive this activism connection home clearly [12] [13] (and I say that as a huge fan of McWhorter as a linguist, BTW). Capitalizing both has long (my entire life and then some) been standard practice at many publications already. If Black and White are good enough for CNN [14] [15], the U.S. Census Bureau [16], APA style (Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, one of the most-used academic style guides in the world, and influential on MoS) [17], among many others, then they're good enough for Wikipedia. While, yes, various publishers went the other direction and down-cased both (e.g. [18] [19] [20] [21] [22]), many are now reversing this decision (entirely or – often with dubious and subjective rationalizations [23] – in a reactive and politicized half-measures way). It simply is not acceptable to capitalize one but not the other here, for neutrality reasons, regardless what some publishers (who have paying audiences and advertisers to appease) choose to do, and I do not believe that anyone in this discussion doesn't actually understand that. Some are just seeking to skirt it to further their socio-political viewpoint. It's one I share, but we all know better than to do that on Wikipedia.

  I have always favored capitalization when these words are used in this broadly conglomerating/generalizing ethno-racial sense, because it is jarring and likely offensive to have something like "The organization's Asian, black, Caucasian, and Hispanic advisory board members all agreed with the policy change", down-casing one category as if denigrating them. Used in this way, "Black" and "White" should be capitalized also because they are serving as stand-in names for (not literal descriptions of) human ethno-racial categorizations, and are thus acting in proper-name capacity, by definition. Just because "Black" is an imposed (and arguably originally derogatory) exonym is irrelevant; we don't write "navajo" with a lower-case n just because that's an exonym for the Dineh people. When "Brown" is used this way, it should also be capitalized; however, it is slangish and has nowhere near the penetration into mainstream, formal writing as "Black" and "White", so WP should probably not be using it except in quoted material. If we don't capitalize these terms, we also have a consistency problem with very similar but more specific ethnic names, like Coloured, a particular mixed-ethnicity group in South Africa, about whom that term is always capitalized (and always with a u).

  None of these terms should be capitalized when not used in this ethnic manner: "My Hispanic half-sister is more brown that me." "Albinistic people can look very pale white in some light, but are actually rather pinkish because their lack of pigmentation makes their skin a bit translucent." "The mole on my back is virtually pitch black." Just because it has something to do with coloration and skin at all doesn't make it an ethnic label and thus doesn't make it a proper name.

  Terms like "indigenous", "aboriginal", and "native" should only be capitalized when they are used in the same manner, as a name for, not just a description of, a specific group. Thus, people from the native populations of Australia are referred to as "Aboriginals", "Aboriginal Australians", or (decreasingly) "Aborigines"; it's effectively their official collective name. But it's lower-case a [or i or n] in "There are several different languages families among the aboriginal [or indigenous or native] peoples of the Americas." Other examples that have become proper names are Native Americans, and First Nations.
   —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:56, 15 July 2020 (UTC); revised: 10:28, 16 July 2020 (UTC); 2nd choice added: 03:21, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

  • I wouldn't call the "Ideas" section of The Atlantic's website (not the print magazine) a "newspaper of record", but even that source says "head[ing] off ambiguity" is one of the reasons for capitalizing "Black" as a racial identity. [24] As does the New York Times source, saying, "there are grammatical reasons — [Black] is a proper noun". [25] So clearly it's not just socio-political messaging. And as the Atlantic piece also points out, the invention of racial categories such as "Black" and "White" was itself a form of socio-political messaging. [26] (Note that this Britannica article capitalizes "Black" but not "white".) Politics is the reason we call America "America" and not some Indigenous name.
    I also don't see how one can argue on the one hand that what's good enough for CNN et al. is good enough for us, and on the other hand dismiss different style choices by otherwise reliable sources as based on "dubious and subjective rationalizations". Does CNN not also have customers and advertisers to please? Whatever sources' politics may be, NPOV doesn't mean excluding all subjective viewpoints (as if that were possible), but fairly and proportionally representing the mainstream viewpoint as mainstream. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 19:50, 29 August 2020 (UTC) (edited 01:53, 31 August 2020 (UTC))

SMcCandlish I am in the process of creating a style guide for Australian articles on this very topic, and countrywide RS style guides use capitals for Indigenous and Aboriginal, use Aboriginal people in place of Aboriginals or Aborigines (only using the latter when quoting historical usage). (Incidentally, Indigenous includes both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.) The other convention is to always use the group name (e.g. Kaurna) where the individual has identified themselves as such, or the language being talked about is specific. Just FYI. :-) I'm just not sure where is a good place to place the style guide when complete - at the moment, it's in the Australian project pages. Laterthanyouthink ( talk) 02:41, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose. Echoing others in that this goes against WP:NPOV. OTOH, this seems like an opportunity to review if the publications and institutions adopting such a policy—presumably more politically rather than grammatically motivated—should be considered reliable sources in the future, seeing as they are headstrong to wear bias justified with tortured pretext about "identity" on their sleeve. 93.106.91.218 ( talk) 18:54, 15 July 2020 (UTC) — 93.106.91.218 ( talk) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.
• Support 'Black' because more and more RS are going that way. No objection to tabling and discussing again in a month or so, but I think that's where we're headed. Oppose 'White' until RS start using that, too. —valereee ( talk) 23:21, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

  FWIW, the AP, NYT, WSJ, ^[6] and Columbia Journalism Review ^[7] are now capitalizing Black. —valereee ( talk) 10:21, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

  @ Valereee: Sources already are capitalizing "White", too (e.g.: [27] [28] [29], etc.). Many publishers have been doing this for decades. The "only capitalize 'Black'" idea is primarily left-leaning American newspapers, over the last month or so, and for declared political reasons. The vast majority of publishers capitalize neither, though for reasons I've detailed above, the most linguistically sound approach is capitalizing both because they are serving the function of proper names. That's a sound enough reason for WP to capitalize both despite neither "Black, White" nor "Black, white" being the dominant style across all sources in the aggregate. MoS has more than one concern, even with regard to capitalization. "Only capitalize what sources almost always capitalize" is a default position, but it can be overridden (like anything in these guidelines) by additional encyclopedic concerns like grammatical function (e.g., we use many en dashes where less studious publishers misapply hyphens), and the neutrality policy.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:37, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

  SMcCandlish, left-leaning like the Wall Street Journal? White doesn't seem to be as common. The Atlantic, yes. ^[8] The Columbia Journalism Review, no. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Valereee ( talk • contribs) 10:49, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

  I have to presume you missed the word "primarily", since it was included for a reason. When someone writes a sentence that parses to "the sources doing this are mostly on the left, with some exceptions" and you respond with an example of an already known exception, you have not made any form of argument, much less addressed the substance of my rebuttal. Cf. Hand-waving.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:09, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

  [I]t can be overridden (like anything in these guidelines) by additional encyclopedic concerns like grammatical function – isn't this exactly why sources like the AP are arguing for the capital "B" in "Black"? As the AP's vice president for standards says, "The lowercase black is a color, not a person ... These changes align with long-standing capitalization of other racial and ethnic identifiers such as Latino, Asian American and Native American". [30] — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 00:50, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

  Already covered that, right from the start: AP's argument applies to all ethnic "colo[u]r terms", including White.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:21, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose capitalizing one but not the other, as well as opposing putting any hard and fast rule in place regarding capitalizing these terms (I'm assuming none is in place now). Dhtwiki ( talk) 23:58, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose - Capitalize both. Magnolia677 ( talk) 16:16, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
• Strong oppose until broad consensus is shown in sources; Wikipedia only should reflect what it is already there in the world; mabe we need to go back to our purpose: "to benefit readers by acting as an encyclopedia, a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge." We should not try to shape the world, only to reflect the way it is; part of this it that we should only endorse a change in the way it is if the change is supported by the consensus among reliable sources. Thus this change, which does not appear to be yet commonplace among sources, is outweighed by historical president. If the world is racist/not valuing race highly enough (by not capitalising races), it is not our job to change it. WT79 ^{( speak to me | editing patterns | what I been doing)} 20:31, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
• Tentative support for "Black" for US-related subjects per MOS:TIES. As the AP is US-centric, it would be better if more countries' top style guides joined in. That said, the AP's logic that "lowercase black is a color, not a person" seems eminently reasonable. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 15:43, 4 August 2020 (UTC) (edited 21:46, 30 August 2020 (UTC))
  • But that is not any kind of argument against "White" (or "Brown" for that matter). Historically, even the now disused "Red" and "Yellow" used in an ethno-racial sense have also often (though not consistently) been capitalized [31] [32].  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:43, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
    • And if the AP started using "Red" and "Yellow" to refer to people (capitalized, of course), then I'd consider supporting the same usage here. Till then, let's try to stick to the matter at hand. I'll emphasize that I haven't explicitly taken a stand vis-a-vis capitalizing "White". — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 22:21, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
• Strong oppose for consistency. One source pondering the use of it does not justify reworking grammar rules as an entirety. Adjectives are lowercase in every other capacity. Further, it breaks WP:NPOV by capitalizing a single form of identity. Anon0098 ( talk) 23:23, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

  Yeah, and NYT also capitalizes (capitalises, sorry) "Black" in the slogan "Black lives matter instead of leaving it lowercase:"black lives matter". What I really don't understand is why this specifc slogan refers to African-Americans as "black" rather than the more correct "African-American". Also, if we're going to capitalice every racial term, why not do the same with the generic words "Man", "Woman", "Child" and so on the way the Bible capitalizes the words "You", "He", "Him", "Your", "His" and so on? -- Fandelasketchup ( talk) 21:31, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

  I don't think I'll every really understand it, honestly. It serves no purpose other than to put one race on a pedestal over others, which is what I thought was the opposite of what we are supposed to be doing, especially on Wikipedia. Anon0098 ( talk) 05:02, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

• Strong oppose for consistency + wikipedia needs to remain neutral Devokewater @ 12:04, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Since ethnic/racial identifiers such as " African American", " Asian American", " Latino", and " Native American" are already capitalized, doing the same with "Black" (or "Black" + "Brown" + "White") would give us more consistency, not less. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 21:03, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
    • Asia, America, and Latin America are all locations and are normally capitalized regardless. "Black" is not a location Anon0098 ( talk) 21:29, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
• Comment: many of the "oppose" !votes seem to contend that capitalizing "Black" but not "white" reflects a value judgement. This logic is somewhat strained. The newsrooms now capitalizing "Black" seem to be using it like a proper noun/ proper adjective, à la " Italic peoples" vs. " italic type". Whether any of us find that decision "neutral" is irrelevant; we should just follow the most reliable sources. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 17:23, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
  • That doesn't mean "just the sources I prefer to read", though. Newspapers and other media are nowhere near consistent on this, and plenty of publishers considered reliable by Wikipedia are either capitalizing neither or capitalizing both. There is absolutely no question that capitalizing "Black" alone is the highly charged taking of a socio-political stance, the use of language as an armament in the "culture war". That puts it outside WP's style orbit by definition. If "Black" and "White" are good enough for, say, The Washington Post [34] then they're good enough for Wikipedia. If "black" and "white" are good enough for, e.g., The New York Times [35], then they're good enough for WP. I favor the capitalization (of White, too), for linguistic-logic and WP:CONSISTENT reasons I've given above, but either will do.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:43, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
    • I meant a "value judgement" by Wikipedia editors, not newsrooms; I should have been clearer about that. Not sure where I've suggested cherry-picking sources. The AP is "preferred" as a style guide by many respected publications (in the US at least). And not to get too far off topic, but I think the "culture war" really began when European colonial powers designated "black" as a separate racial group in order to use their supposed inferiority (as a people and a culture) to justify slavery. It's good to have some perspective on these things. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 22:04, 28 August 2020 (UTC) (edited 00:18, 31 August 2020 (UTC))
    • Also, the NYT does now capitalize "Black", e.g. [36] [37] [38]. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 20:23, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
    • Note: to clarify further, comments such as "Do it for all or do it for none", "If we do decide to do this we need to do it for all races", "if we make a change it should be to uniformly capitalize all 'races'", and "it breaks WP:NPOV by capitalizing a single form of identity" show a basic misunderstanding of NPOV. Per policy, NPOV means proportionally reflecting the views of reliable sources, without adding our own editorial bias or giving a false impression of parity. It doesn't matter whether any of us think the proposal is fair in a real-world sense, only that it accurately reflects the sources. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 18:18, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose: this wokification of Wikipedia is really getting tiresome. There is no reason, other than politics, to insist on capitalizing "black" but not "white"—it's a childish game and far beneath the dignity of a serious encyclopedia. Elle Kpyros ( talk) 22:35, 27 August 2020 (UTC) — Ekpyros ( talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.
• Oppose. I think this is pretty clearly at odds with MOS:CAPS: Only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia. Plenty of RSs do not capitalise black so we should continue to default to lowercase. From a writing perspective, I think capitalising black and white is pretty senseless; these terms do not derive from proper nouns (unlike, for example, Asia - > Asian). I think the choice to capitalise is made more on political grounds than matters of logic or clarity. That's not to say that politics isn't a good reason to change how we write things, but to me this simply feels sanctimonious. (I hope I'm not on the wrong side of history there; it will be interesting to see if this trend survives the language's general trend away from capitalising.) Popcornfud ( talk) 16:28, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
  • If we're talking about where the terms come from, then even many proper nouns are named for things that would not be capitalized in modern writing. In the case of "Asia", the name may ultimately derive from an Akkadian word referring to sunrise. Linguistic conventions are mostly arbitrary; I think we should limit discussion to whether the proposed usage reflects the majority of high-quality sources. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 22:43, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
    • Sangdeboeuf, that's fair. However.... it doesn't. Popcornfud ( talk) 15:45, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
      • @ Popcornfud: perhaps and perhaps not. Also, I assume you overlooked your earlier !vote [39] when writing the above comment. Might want to strike one or the other. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 03:56, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
        • Sangdeboeuf, whoops! I thought this was a new discussion on a different MoS page. I'll strike the old one. Thanks for spotting that. Popcornfud ( talk) 29 August 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose – This creates more NPOV problems than it solves. ---  C& C ( Coffeeandcrumbs) 03:54, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose if other skin colours of people aren't capitalised. Too inconsistent. If black is capitalised that should be because of grammar, not politics. That grammar should then be consistently applied to all similar words: white, brown, yellow, red. Leo Breman ( talk) 13:40, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
  • @ Leo Breman: if you can find many articles describing people as "red" and "yellow" in Wikipedia's voice, I'd be very surprised. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 22:41, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
  • NYT: "For proponents of capitalizing black, there are grammatical reasons — it is a proper noun, referring to a specific group of people with a shared political identity". Grammar is not set in stone. You might even say it's political. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 00:34, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose per MOS:CAPS requiring a "substantial majority of independent, reliable sources", and per WP:Due weight. Academic and popular publishers are not doing this, and most of the media, aside from some cherry-picked examples, is not either. I know that we all want to correct racial injustice, but Wikipedia is not itself for righting great wrongs, nor is it to push a linguistic reform agenda. Crossroads ^-talk- 19:01, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
  • And if we follow the logic of WP:RGW then any "Do it for all or do it for none"–style arguments are moot, since they have nothing to do with RS usage. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 08:05, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
• Update: Two more academic style guides, the AMA Manual of Style [40] and Chicago Manual of Style [41], now capitalize "Black" in an ethnic or racial sense. (AMA also capitalizes "White", while Chicago says "White" may be capitalized in these circumstances.) This is addition to the already-mentioned APA Style [42] and many newsrooms, including the Associated Press [43], the Columbia Journalism Review [44], the Wall Street Journal [45], The New York Times [46], USA Today [47], the Los Angeles Times [48], NBC News ( example), and Chicago Tribune [49]. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 01:18, 26 September 2020 (UTC) (edited 22:11, 17 October 2020 (UTC))
• Oppose as per many of the arguments above and per WP:Discrimination should the proposal be to capitalise one race and not a different one.-- Shakehandsman ( talk) 01:53, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
  • Gee, don't you mean " reverse discrimination"? ^sarcasm — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 03:17, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
    • See WP:ASPERSIONS and WP:BLUDGEON. Crossroads ^-talk- 02:38, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
      • @ Crossroads: if you have a complaint to make, WP:ANI is thataway. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 21:25, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
• Weak oppose: It's definitely complicated. On one hand, many treat Black/White/Brown as an identity, which might alone validate its conversion into a proper noun. On the other hand, all three cases are still generalizations which become fairly absurd when analyzed.

  For "black", not only is there significant genetic diversity still present in Africa, but it is also used for groups like Aboriginal Australians who could be as much as 70,000 years genetically removed from Africa -- moreso than much of Eurasia.

  For "white", although the gap is a bit less wide, in still embodies a wide range of European tribes with genetically diverse features and a frankly arbitrary end point, given the extensive history of Eurasian trade.

  For "brown", aside from being a worldwide catch-all lacking any logical cohesion other than skin color, members of the other two groups have been misidentified as this due to both randomness and the complicated trading of genes within the old world for thousands of years.

At the end of the day, they don't actually identify any cohesive groups as skin color is a spectrum. They do serve as clunky political terms but I'm not entirely convinced that their capitalization in the media is enough to justify capitalization in an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias should be rigid and slow to change, but moreover, immune to political whims. I think Wikipedia should wait about 10 years and see what the rest of the populace does. -- sarysa ( talk) 01:13, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

• You're basically arguing against the concept of race itself, which is well beyond the scope of MoS. Terms like "Black" and "White" may indeed be clunky, but they are used in a wide range of published sources, as well as throughout the encyclopedia, for topics ranging from Black nationalism to Whiteness studies. All we're concerned with is whether the style is appropriate for how the terms are actually used. Unless the terms are describing literal visual color, then they are being used as proper nouns. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 04:17, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

  Sarysa The use of "black" to describe Indigenous Australians is considered unacceptable these days. The use of "blackfella" or Black by Indigenous people themselves is different, but the term "blacks" is a leftover from colonial days and has dropped out of use. I'm compiling a style guide for use in Australian articles at the moment, based on best practice style guides, but (as commented elsewhere) not sure where it's going to end up yet. Laterthanyouthink ( talk) 02:41, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose: For one, Wikipedia is not in the fashion business. The AP makes a change in late summer 2020, and is Wikipedia to ask "how high?". Wikipedia goes by the sources. Right now, you have several hundred years since English diverged from German and ceased to capitalise all nouns. For the time being, some sources have adopted the oddity, and some have not; is Wikipedia about to take sides? This aside from the fact that capitalising "black" is your typical cultural colonialism. Only ignorant Westerners fail to realise that in Africa there are many native ethnic groups: Bantus, Guineans, Aris, Pygmys, Khoisans, Berbers, Arabs, Jews, etc. You see? We capitalise the ethnic group, we don't capitalise the skin color; and it takes supreme cultural imperialism to bunch all these people into an invented "ethnicity" that simply does not exist. XavierItzm ( talk) 03:00, 2 October 2020 (UTC)
  • Neither does phlogiston exist, yet we still have an article describing it as a concept. Would you have us delete articles like Black people outright? — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 19:34, 2 October 2020 (UTC)
• Weak oppose - It's just AP doing this. I don't think we should be following the leader until there's actually a following to consider. Until more WP:RS follow suit, then I'll reconsider my vote. Love of Corey ( talk) 04:08, 2 October 2020 (UTC)
  • It's far more than just the AP. See #Update above. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 19:34, 2 October 2020 (UTC)
    • Do you have links to all of the other newspaper publications that you just referenced? Love of Corey ( talk) 06:45, 4 October 2020 (UTC)
      • CJR, WSJ, NYT, USA Today, LA Times, NBC News, Chicago Tribune — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 20:52, 4 October 2020 (UTC)
        • @ Sangdeboeuf: Any non-American, non-journalistic sources that suggest this is more than a recent US-centric change to be due influence on all the readers and all the editors of a global non-American encyclopaedia? GPinkerton ( talk) 18:33, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
• Support—per the NABJ's style guide: NABJ also recommends that whenever a color is used to appropriately describe race then it should be capitalized, such as Black community, Brown community, White community. I'm not so sure that this is a U.S.-only thing, either: for example Négritude has been fairly frequently capitalized in English going back almost a hundred years, according to the Wiktionary talk page discussion. -- ‿Ꞅtruthious 𝔹andersnatch ͡ |℡| 04:30, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose - I don't believe this has yet become a majority of US-based RS, but a look at English speaking sources (mainly newspapers and books, I didn't check journals properly) in: the USA, UK, India, Canada, Australia, Kenya, South Africa, Hong Kong and a couple of others in European countries found that, in any case, it was far short of a majority. We are en-wiki, not us-wiki, and so at this time I believe remaining with the status quo on lower-case black/white/brown is correct. It may well change in the next 12 months. There are also a few other areas raised in the discussion (indigenous/Indigenous etc), that a much stronger claim can be made for. Consider me neutral on those at this point. Nosebagbear ( talk) 09:55, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
  • This is another argument for limiting the change to topics with MOS:TIES to the US, as Bagumba proposed. In such a context, it looks like a substantial majority of respected style guides are endorsing the change. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 19:07, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
• Support as a non-American observer and reader, it seems to me as if the tide has turned and Black will continue to be capitalised by most major sources, in reference to African Americans. The case is weak for capitalising "white" because the latter is much more heterogeneous and not regarded as an ethnic group in any sense. Laterthanyouthink ( talk) 02:41, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose: capitalize neither as a non-American observer and reader both read as excessive hangovers from the time when it was thought races were actual things with defined immutable characteristics not shades of skin colour with no objective reality. In addition, capital-B-black seems to be a limited-applicability, mainly US alternative to "American American", and "American American" is a not synonymous with "black". I would be indifferent to compound capitalizations like "Black British" or "White American" but in general English does not capitalize adjectives and neither should we. GPinkerton ( talk) 18:28, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
• Support capitalizing both. Ridiculous to capitalize one and not the other, as is being done in an article now. Talk:Shooting_of_Breonna_Taylor#Black_and_white We need a set rule as to what it is to avoid constant edit warring and arguing all over Wikipedia. Dream Focus 23:59, 6 December 2020 (UTC)
• Closure request notice: Since this has been open for a whopping 169 days (as of this writing), I've asked for formal closure via WP:ANRFC. I think the available options are "capitalize neither", "capitalize both", "capitalize both or neither, per editorial discretion at each article", "capitalize one not the other", or "do whatever (including capitalizing one not the other), per editorial discretion at each article". I don't think any other option has been suggested in the course of the discussion.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:08, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Extended discussion

• I have to add some detailed observations and analysis to what I've already said. Even as a mostly left-of-center person in the US, I have to keep in mind, as do we all, that this is not US-pedia or LiberalsOnlyPedia. The fact that pretty much zero right-of-center publications (and no, I don't mean conspiracy theorists' fake-news sites, but generally reliable sources) are doing the "Black and Black only" thing matters, more than the average participant on this page would like to admit. So does the fact that most non-US but English-language publications are not drinking any of this excessively selective capitalization Kool-Aid. And for good reason: the central argument in favor of "Black only" is that the African-American experience is uniquely special due to slavery, the US Civil War, Jim Crow, the US civil rights movements, a largely racist Southern culture, programmatic racism in policing and sentencing, etc., etc., all as a combined and very specific socio-historical package (that part is true); and, the argument goes (and this is already a real stretch), this makes Black as a term, in American writing, different from White and Brown and the now-disused Red and Yellow. This argument doesn't port well to Canada or the UK or various other places. And it's a terrible argument anyway. It's a general semantics logic failure, of confusing a label (the term) with qualities of that which is labeled (African Americans and their socio-historical experience). In Korzybsky's terms, this is confusing the map with the territory, mistaking the menu for the meal.

  If you look more deeply into this "only Black" thing, it's an activism-originated and now, to a limited extent, news-writing shift. As the latter, it is largely driven by three (American) journalism forces: AP Stylebook (which many US – but not other – newspapers follow without variance), USA Today (the "least common denominator" US paper, barely more reliable than a tabloid, and rarely divergent from any AP choices), and NYT, which publishes its own (often weird) style guide, but has the same target audience and advertisers as most US papers, and so follows AP on almost all politicized choices. LA Times is in exactly the same boat as NYT (other than their style guide hasn't seen a new edition in print for a very long time).

  The idea is not finding much support among book publishers, journal publishers, and others so far, nor among conservative-leaning news publishers, nor among centrist and even center-left news publishers who think carefully about style rather than just apply AP as a house rule. We know that the mainstream news media in the US (and most of the West) leans heavily leftward, and that it goes out of its way to avoid offending the sensibilities of the left (much more so than it does for the right); their attempts to appease advertisers (the actual primary source of their income) also play heavily into decisions like this. That is, as sources on what do on a heavily socio-politicized style question, they are twice-over not WP:INDY of the subject, but have direct fiduciary rationales for their preferences. Some of them resist it anyway. One example is The Atlantic (which is centrist or slightly left, depending on your definitions); see their editorial (written by a Black professor at NYU, though of Ghanaian-British, not African-American, background) on why it should be Black but also White too [50]. Unsurprisingly, his rationales are consistent with those raised in this discussion already. Reliable sources like Washington Examiner tell us clearly that this shift (for now) among some news organizations is political, and show that it is based on extremely dubious assertions.

  To just pick one, let's start with this doozy from Columbia Journalism Review (which also generally follow's AP's lead): "Black is an ethnic designation; white merely describes the skin color of people who can, usually without much difficulty, trace their ethnic origins back to a handful of European countries". That's just nonsensical in multiple ways, and no cultural anthropologist or ethnologist who wasn't a kook would agree with this assessment. Let's just hit the high points quickly: Ethnicities, cultures, and subcultures are not determined by genealogical accuracy; they are mutable processes of collective acculturation. White does not describe skin color; it's a hand-wavy metaphor, exactly like other ethnic "color terms", including Black, and none of us are literally white or black, we're all part of a range of very pale tan to very dark brown. These terms are likely doomed within a few generations anyway, right along with Red and Yellow. Most White Americans are not from any particular European genetic or cultural background, but are a mishmash of a bunch of them (and often some non-European, too). The areas (mostly West African) from which most African ancestors were brought to the Americas are in fact well-known. This "ease of European-American genealogy" hypothesis a dead distinction now if it ever was one, because genetic tests, for about 20+ years now, can determine exactly where your ancestors came from, including in Africa. It's also meaningless because White and Black modern Americans generally have no direct social or experiential connection to "the old country/countries", unless of recent-immigrant stock (which would also apply to recent African immigrants), or unless they are "background aficionados" (and there are Black ones, too, especially since Alex Haley and others have spurred African Americans from the 1970s onward to investigate their own African ethno-cultural and now genetic backgrounds in detail). Moreover, it's especially meaningless because the dominant White American culture has mostly erased the lines between different European-descended groups in this country (while there are still anti-Semities, most Ashkenazi Jews in the US are part of "White", and there is virtually nothing left of the formerly common discrimination against certain European sub-ethnicities in the US, including Irish, Cornish, and Italian Americans). So, the main reason CJR argues that Black refers to a modern distinct meta-ethnicity in its own right actually has also applied to White in this country since around the late 19th century.

  Next, no sociologist or other kind of social scientist who was not a kook would buy CJR's premise either, for two super-obvious reasons: 1) Most clearly of all, it simply would not be possible for the US to be dominated by a White American group with categorical White privilege, White dialect patterns in their English usage, and White voting, investing, consuming, music-preference, etc., patterns that are clearly identifiable, and so on, if White American, from the late 19th c. onward, were not an "ethnicity" or "ethnic group" in the over-broad sense that Black American or African American is. Indeed, arguing otherwise is basically socio-politically dangerous, as it provides "subconscious White supremacists" an obvious out: "I'm not White, and there is no White privilege, and I'm tired of being called 'White' and blamed for your problems. I'm Irish-Italian-Dutch, and about 2/3 of my own ancestors were discriminated against. So quit whining and just work harder. TANSTAAFL!" I've already occasionally encountered arguments like this my entire life, and they are now more common than ever. But this observation by me may itself be a soapboxy, political point (since it's anti-racialist and is critical of "white grievance" posturing and excuse-making).

  2) European sub-ethnicities like Scottish and Montenegrin and Swedish are not used in the US as classifiers, by the government, by cops, by universities, by financial institutions, or by any other social force that matters, any more than they ask African Americans if they are of Eritrean or Kenyan stock in particular (but note that Asians often are asked to be more specific). It's just a White/Caucasian/European catch-all check box, like African. "African" itself is an over-generalization, since there are Afro-Asiatic (Semitic and Berber) and Turkic peoples also native since antiquity to North Africa, and most of the population of Madagascar is of Maritime Southeast Asian heritage). What our sociological categorizers are really asking is whether someone is of Sub-Saharan African ethnic background (though that, too, is not actually an ethnicity under most definitions; there's more genetic diversity between neighboring groups of Africans than between the Germans and the Okinawans). These sociological "ethnic" grouping classifiers like "White" and "Black" and "Asian" are based not on genetics or culture but geopolitics and its arbitrary labeling. Virtually nothing ever asks if someone is Turkic, for example. If you're a Turkish American, you're expected to identify as white; if your Turkic family background is from a bit more easterly (e.g. Azerbaijani or Turkmeni), you'll end up classified as Middle-Eastern, and if from further east (Uyghur, Kyrgyz) as Asian – which is not any kind of ethnic group at all, but a geographic origin label. At least most of these checkbox lists now split Asian up into subcategories that make a bit more sense (various Indic peoples are more closely related to Europeans, as are most Turkic and Semitic ones, than to East Asians, and Southeast Asians intergrade with Pacific Islanders all the way down to New Guinea and New Zealand).

  The key take-way here is that if anything like the CJR rationale is actually a major factor in some news organizations' and activism organizations' rationales for "Black but white and brown" (and it certainly seems to be, in one wording or another, in most of the "why we're only capitalizing Black" statements I've read), it is patently pseudoscientific on many points, historically inaccurate, based on gross misunderstandings of ethnicity and culture and social forces, and just flat-out counterfactual and irrational nonsense in many places. We have a term for this: WP:FRINGE. Hell, not even all far-left Americans agree this is a good idea, since many were long working on getting publications to write Black, Brown, and White and were already meeting with growing success. So, this is a fringe of a fringe, an internecine faction fight amongst progressives. The way to deal (off-WP or onsite) with a tedious false equivalence like "White and Black Americans are the same, they're just ethnical groupings", which ignores centuries of differential justice and economics along racialized lines, is not to erect a farcical fantasy argument based itself on a whole slew of other false equivalences, irrelevancies, confusion of labels with what they label, and patently false claims. It's to be honest and rational and treat everyone with respect when it comes to labeling/classification. PS: for anyone unclear on why ethnicity and race and ancestry and heritage are themselves hard to even understand and talk about, as if we all mean different things by them sometimes, it's because we do. See WP:Race and ethnicity for a run-down on this, which also includes some historical background on what makes the Black experience in America so different and why the US is unusually fraught with racialism, racism, and related strife. Most importantly, it covers why not to bring that socio-political baggage with you when editing Wikipedia. See also WP:SYSTEMICBIAS and, of course, WP:NPOV.
   —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:42, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

  • There are two issues to consider: (1) Is the style used by a substantial majority of reliable sources? (2) Are these sources influential on the style of other publications? Any other concerns are a distraction. Whether the change involves right-of-center...centrist [or] center-left sources is beside the point. We don't have political litmus tests for reliability. The only relevant standard per MOS:CAPS is whether a source has a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy.
    The notion that this is WP:CIRCULAR sourcing makes no sense. There's no evidence that the AP and others are following Wikipedia, since WP does not now generally capitalize "Black" in an ethnic or racial sense. Accounting for English usage in Canada or the UK or various other places seems like an argument for applying the change to US-related subjects only, per MOS:TIES. (It also puts the lie to the notion that this is a left-wing issue; in the UK or Europe the New York Times would be considered centrist or even center-right.)
    The most persuasive argument here against the proposal is that it is not finding much support among book publishers [and] journal publishers. There's no need to muddy the waters with a lot of speculation about sources' reasoning or motives. The idea that the Associated Press and The New York Times, among others, have a financial or legal relationship to the topic of capitalizing/lowercasing "Black" is quite a stretch, and would appliy equally to conservative publications, who also have fiduciary rationales for resisting the change (the idea that the Washington Examiner is particularly reliable is also new to me). In fact, the most prominent conservative news outlet, Fox News, is adopting the change as well, while also capitalizing "White" and "Brown". [51] — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 22:01, 4 September 2020 (UTC) edited 20:51, 7 September 2020 (UTC))

    @ Sangdeboeuf: The reason I wrote an embedded essay that touches on so many topics is because the rationales being offered throughout the overall discussion do so, and directly make, or more indirectly rely on material that makes, various dubious assumptions. The answers to your opening questions are clearly "not even close", and "to a limited extent". As for news outlets' fiscal reliance on pleasing their reader and advertiser bases, and the effects that may have on their coverage, fact-checking, stylistic choices, etc., I invite you to spend some time at WP:RSN, where such matters are a frequent source of discussion about right-wing media and their suitability as sources to cite on Wikipedia. Next, it's important not to confuse proper Fox News journalism (which WP generally treats as reliable, "excluding politics and science" – WP:FOXNEWS), and the opinion shows on Fox News, which are ultra-right WP:FRINGE stuff. The fact that the actual news from Fox News is doing "Black and White" (not "white") along with other, much more left-wing outlets including The Atlantic and The Washington Post and the National Association of Black Journalists (a recent change from "black and white" and then, briefly, "Black but white"), and the Diversity Style Guide [52], etc., supports my central argument: "Black but white" is a preference of one faction of the left. Checking WP:RSP, I see that Washington Examiner is considered "no consensus" as to being a reliable source, largely because it's primarily editorial material. But it's reliable for the fact that people in the news industry are observing that the "Black but white" style is a political choice (with a small set of not always consistent, but consistently highly politicized rationales). The fact that they're on the opposite side of the left–right axis from most of those making that choice doesn't magically invalidate the observation. But lots of others have also written about this, including the Journalism Institute of the National Press Club [53], MacArthur Foundation (who are going with "Black and White") [54], D Magazine (ditto) [55], Conscious Style Guide [56], Center for Public Integrity [57], etc., etc.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:15, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

• Per EEng, it would mean that "White" has to be capped. That's a problem. Tony (talk) 00:55, 18 September 2020 (UTC) Ngrams here and here. Tony (talk) 01:01, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
  • Not necessarily. If we follow MOSCAPS we just use the same style as the majority of RSes, which one would be hard-pressed to argue is a problem. And not everyone agrees capitalizing "White" is problematic anyway. The NYT cites the sociologist Eve Ewing as one scholar supporting capital-W "White", because in her words, "'Whiteness is not incidental ... Whiteness is endowed with social meaning ...'" In The Atlantic, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah addresses the same issue that EEng seems to allude to, saying "If the capitalization of white became standard among anti-racists, [white supremacists’] gesture [of capitalizing 'white'] would ... lose all force". Appiah also quotes this statement from the Center for the Study of Social Policy, which says, "it is important to call attention to White as a race as a way to understand and give voice to how Whiteness functions in our social and political institutions and our communities". And as SMcCandlish pointed out, the U.S. Census Bureau and the influential Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association capitalize both. I myself am agnostic about "White". Just some food for thought. — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 07:48, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
    • I've been following the news in earnest this year, and every single day I see mainstream news sources using black and white, or Black and White, with only a few publishers insisting on Black but white to the point of editorially enforcing it (even among those that made statements in favor of Black but white, various writers at most them do Black and White anyway without being overridden by later editors). In answer to Tony1: Using White is only a problem if it's done alone. In the sense of it as an ethnic/racial name (even an informal one), it is operating as a proper noun, and is not actually descriptive. (Even people with albinism are not literally white, but a very pale off-white.) It it thus operating exactly the same as Black, Brown (in that catchall "everyone but Caucasians" ethno-racial sense), and the now-taboo Red ("the Red man's ways") and Yellow ("the Yellow peril in the Pacific war"). All that's aside from the NPoV concerns of capitalizing one but not the other[s], and there are multiple such concerns (WP siding with a particular socio-politico-linguistic activism cause, WP treating a particular ethnic group with special signification capitals denied to others, etc.). By default MoS would have us use lower case, because reliable sources independent of the subject are not consistently doing one of the three patterns. However, I argue that all of them should be capitalized because of their proper-naming function, and to be WP:CONSISTENT with other racio-ethnic terminology. Either way, those are the only two viable choices. The responses above indicate nothing like a consensus for Black but white.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:36, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
      • The use of "Black" is not a SIGCAPS issue when reliable sources use it. MOSCAPS doesn't say to follow the majority of RSes unless they do something you don't agree with like capitalizing only one racial group. It says we follow the majority of reliable sources, full stop. If you want to argue we can't follow reliable sources in this matter because it would impress upon the reader the importance or specialness of something, then you could make the same argument for virtually any capitalized proper noun. As for mainstream news sources, here's a sampling of articles from the past several days that show up near the top of results when you google " black people COVID":
        • NBC News: "the number of Black-owned businesses declined more than 40 percent across the U.S. between February and April, while white-owned businesses declined 17 percent"

        • The Washington Post: "The trust of a first-generation covid-19 vaccine is significantly less among Black Americans compared to White or Hispanic people"

        • Harvard Business Review: "ACE-inhibitors used to treat hypertension, for example, are less effective in Black patients compared to white patients"

        • NPR: "While there may be an uptick in Black people owning guns in the United States today ... The majority of gun owners are white men"
        None of these outlets are lowercasing "black" with regard to race or ethnicitiy. Could you provide some evidence of writers at publications who have announced the change to using "Black" and "white" using Black and White anyway without being overridden by later editors? — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 21:42, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

• BBC: "Now, we're the core and centre of black British music and have been for the past 11 years."

• USA Today: “Union, a black woman, was singled out”

• Financial Times: "Mbali Ntuli, 32, would be only the second black leader in the troubled liberal party’s 20-year history"

• ABC-9: “With the goal to mobilize black men to support racial justice”}}

• The Vanderbilt Hustler: “it is necessary for black students to have a safe space on campus”

• The Guardian: “ Josh talks to black fans, writers and critics about how they view racism”

XavierItzm ( talk) 10:21, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

That USA Today quote is not a statement by the author, but a direct quotation from a discrimination complaint filed by the subject of the article. I'm not sure why the rest of these were posted here, since none of them besides USA Today announced that they would capitalize "Black" (and the inclusion of a student newspaper doesn't seem relevant to anything). — Sangdeboeuf ( talk) 20:10, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Plus it's just as easy to cherry-pick a list of counter examples, and it's already clear that the claim that "the majority of RSes" are doing "Black but white" is false. I see "black and white" or "Black and White" every single day (unless I read no news). The Washington Post's apparent new standard (if they have one, or maybe it's just what their writers are doing without any policy) is "Black and White", as one such example. (I provided a bunch more, above, in another later post today.) And even at papers that said they had a new policy of "Black but white", I keep seeing instances of "Black and White" because various writers are not going along with it and editors are either not noticing or not fighting them over it. As I said at Reconstruction era, the fact that they are serving as proper names for major groups of people is meaningful. It's silly and jarring that the article had "South[ern[ers]]", "North[ern[ers]]", "Colored[s]", "Negro[es]", "Republicans", "Democrats", "Southern Democrats", "African Americans", "European Americans", "Baptists", "Union[ists]", "Confedera[cy|tes]", etc., etc., all capitalized, yet the only two names for massive groups of people that were not capitalized were "white[s]" and "black[s]". And even that was not consistent; various editors of the article had been veering back and forth, with "White" and "Black" occurring at random. So I just normalized it all to "Black" and "White", based on the proper-naming-consistency logic I just laid out, and on this discussion very clearly not coming to a consensus to use "Black but white". (And that edit has stuck, so far, along with a bunch of other cleanup I did, mostly of inconsistent citations and dates and such.)  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:30, 26 October 2020 (UTC); rev'd. 02:15, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

@ SMcCandlish: I read the news every day, and I have never seen "White" (unless combined with a proper noun) and I seldom see "Black", and only in relation to America (that is, the US). All, or almost all, the examples quoted "South[ern[ers]]", "North[ern[ers]]", "Colored[s]", "Negro[es]", "Republicans", "Democrats", "Southern Democrats", "African Americans", "European Americans", "Baptists", "Union[ists]", "Confedera[cy are again American-only terms. North and South are capitalized because they have specific meanings in the US context which is different from non-American, non-capitalized usages, and as a result the demonyms relating to these social groups are likewise capitalized. Ditto for words flowing from the geographical proper nouns "Africa", "Americas", and "Europe", those relating to political or religious persuasions like Baptism (note the need to distinguish from "baptism" and "baptists") and "Democrats" (note again distinction between supporters of "Democratic Party" and "democracy") and those relating to various nationalities and ethnicities like, say: " Red Ruthenians" or " White Huns" (note again not "Huns that are white"). "Republicans" (a meaningless political label no different from "Team Red") has a different meaning to "republicans", and the argument that because an adjective refers to a group of people it should be capitalized is not valid, or else anyone supporting the constitutional situation described by the term "republic" could be described as "Republican", which is obviously not the case. "Colored" (in US contexts) and "Coloured" (in South African contexts, like the Cape Coloureds) were/are defined political-official categories foremost, with meanings specific to their capitalized forms which are different to their non-capitalized forms. (In contexts of historical segregationist societies like these, capitalization of the three segregated groups (viz. whites, coloreds, and coloureds) There really isn't any reason to dignify sweeping generalizations based on skin colour with the status of proper nouns; this is exactly the kind of pigeonholing and emphasis on basically trivial characteristics that one should seek to avoid. There are undoubtedly contexts where capitalizing is appropriate, ("Black hair" is different to "black hair") but I am strongly opposed to enforcing the promotion of what should be an adjectival description into a proper noun label across the project. (Risking whataboutism here but) would the same rationale extend to the forms "Disabled" or "Women"? The capitalization introduces the potential for unwelcome "Othering" and in the text gives undue visual weight to what should be ordinary descriptive words, in my view. GPinkerton ( talk) 19:26, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

@ GPinkerton: See above for already-cited news sources using "Black and White", as well as "black and white" of course, and we know there's a new trend of "Black but white". The world is not consistent on this, so it's up to editorial consensus what WP should do. It's clear from this overall thread that there is not going to be a consensus to use "Black but white", for WP:NPOV reasons. The MoS default on everything is to use lower case when sources are not consistent, unless there's some other reason to capitalize. I'm suggesting that there is: these terms are serving as proper names, even if they're loosey-goosey overgeneralizing ones, and specific to certain cultural contexts. It's jarring to have things like "Asian, black, Latino, white, and Pacific Islander populations" in our text, as if two ethnical groups are some how "lesser" or "demoted". It's just going to cause problems. The very fact that this keeps coming up (long before 2020) proves that. "Black and White" is not a neologistic practice by any means; it's been a common style in English since at least the mid-20th century, probably longer (I didn't go back all that far when digging around, since how people wrote in the Roaring '20s or whenever isn't really relevant to what we should do now.).

I'm really not making any more complicated an argument than that. (And I would support "black and white" as second choice; just not "Black but white".) There's a convention in English to capitalize ethnic names/labels. There is absolutely not such a convention with regard to genders, or to ability/disability classes, so a comparison to those is a reductio ad absurdum. Coloured in the African context is conventionally capitalized, while Negro mostly was when it was current, though usage varied more for the American sense of Colored (which has a very different meaning from the African term), but capitalization of that was also very common. The fact that some of them have US-specific meanings isn't germane; Aboriginal has a special meaning in Australia (also an ethno-racial label), and it is capitalized. There are other such examples, and they're consistent. The only inconsistencies in the pattern are black and white. If you don't think Black and White (along with Hispanic/Latino, Native American, etc.) aren't "defined political-official categories" in the US then you must not live there. These labels are used for official purposes in many ways (census categories, minority grant and scholarship availability, etc.). Similar things seem to apply in various other places, though with different nuances (I'm told the UK tends to be more specific, and distinguishes often between people of Caribbean vs. direct-African descent, but they also definitely do use Black a lot.) If "There are undoubtedly contexts where capitalizing is appropriate", then it should just be capitalized, the end, per MOS:ARTCON and MOS:SIGCAPS.

This isn't about "dignifying" racialism; hell, I wrote WP:Race and ethnicity. It's about the function of the words in the sentence, and the problem of not capitalizing those two when all other such terms are. It becomes a PoV problem in and of itself, from the readers' perspective, regardless of editorial intent. The argument I sometimes see along the lines of "but I don't wanna capitalize in White supremacy" is absurd. We capitalize in neo-Nazi, etc. The problem would be in writing White Supremacy and Neo-Nazi, turning the entire phrases into "proper names" (against MOS:DOCTCAPS, regardless of topic) rather than just capitalizing the proper names within those phrases. In an ideal world, Black and White would get "retired" just like lots of old ethno-racial labels (Orientals, the Red Man, etc.). But it has not happened yet, and we have to write for the real-world readership. This is a "WP is not for language-change activism" matter both coming and going; neologistic practice is one extreme of it, and hyper-traditionalist no-caps-for-either resistance is the other.
[PS: Sorry if some of this is repetitive of previous posts; I've been cooking and going back and forth from the kitchen, and it would take a really long time to re-read this entire thread. On the up-side, I have discovered that adding a bit of chipotle to gumbo or jambalaya, while not exactly traditional, is marvelous.]
 —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:29, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

@ SMcCandlish: I think your argument is misplaced on two massive points. 1.) English does not capitalise "ethnic" words as you say, and when in former days people were described as red, yellow, and brown upper case was not used (though extraneous capitalization has always been popular on the US. There's no reason to capitalize "oriental". "Latino", like "Negro", is an adaptation of a Spanish word that can be capitalised or not capitalized, as preferred. As you say, "colored" needn't be capitalized either but often was for contextual reasons. "Pacific Islander" only needs to be capitalized to distinguish between people from islands in the Pacific Ocean and other islanders that are pacific. "Native American" must be distinguished from individuals personally native to the United States. 2.) Neither "black" nor "white" are ethnicities or races. There is no real category to which "Black" can universally refer except "heterogeneous non-white peoples with blackish skin". Nothing except skin colour connects the black Australian Aborigines with the black people of Brazil. Similarly, nothing except skin colour connects Afghans with Irishmen, and there is no common ethnicity to which both people could be attached and dignified with a capitalized proper name. Likewise "Asian" is not an ethnicity: there is no common ethnicity to which both Thais and Iraqis and Caucasians belong, and the reason "Asian" is capitalized is because it derives from a proper noun, Asia. Also, I think you may have read the situation in Britain incorrectly; "Afro-Carribean" is sometimes used to distinguish (descendants of) black Africans from other black- or dark-skinned ethic groups from elsewhere in the world, like New Guineans or Melanesians. The news sources adduced as evidence deal with the US perspective, which has peculiar and non-universal attitudes to race and terminology. I'd like to see explicit evidence non-African-American black people referred to as "Black" and non-European-Americans referred to as "White". Calling non-capitalization of both colour adjectives"hyper-traditional", rather than just "common sense", "normal", or "non-political" is jumping the gun by a long shot. All (non-American) media I consume use lowercase letters for adjectives, including adjectives relating to perceived skin colour. Again, the "defined social-political categories" of the US are arbitrary and peculiar to that small fraction of the world's population, and are themselves not based on objective characteristics but socially-defined norms inapplicable outside America. In Europe, the concept of "latino" does not exist, and "Hispanic" is not any kind of racial classification, as it in the US; Spain, to European eyes, is a "white" country, but "Hispanics" in the US are usually considered "non-white". Shoehorning all the world into two categories based on skin colour and dubbing them with proper nouns promoted out of simple adjectives is fundamentally unhelpful in my view, and falls into the old category-errors of the (more) racialized past. GPinkerton ( talk) 12:13, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

That claim simply isn't true, though. "The Red man", "the Yellow peril", etc. were frequently capitalized, as was "Oriental" (and still is in the few narrow contexts it retains currency, mostly in its original sense referring to roughly furthest-Eastern Europe though the Middle East to Western Asia [i.e. what used to be the Ottoman Empire]: "Oriental rugs", "Orientalist art", etc.). The fact that they were not always capitalized is irrelevant. (Lots of things WP and other high-quality works capitalize as proper names are mis-lowercased in lower- register writing. Also, various racist writers refused, in their day, to capitalize any term that pertained to the group now usually called African Americans, despite the fact that "Colored", "Negro", etc. were often capitalized by others without such agendas.) English capitalizes virtually all names for ethnic groups (under any definition of ethnic, even a stupid one), even when they originated as descriptors not usual proper names (examples: Native Americans, First Nations, Aboriginal Australians; but not "native South Africans", "indigenous peoples of Mexico", and other descriptors that have not become stock labels, i.e. names). Again, see WP:Race and ethnicity: whether "race" is even a thing at all beyond a social construct is dubious, and whether what the average shopkeeper thinks is an "ethnicity" agrees with anthropological definitions is immaterial to the style question: they are being used as proper names. Something does not have to be real or true to have a proper name (e.g. Uruk-Hai, Piltdown Man).

You're arguing from a position of "This idea is bad, so we should use style tricks to denigrate that point of view." WP simply does not work that way. I'm not going to continue going in circles on this. I've said my piece, and you have too, and that is sufficient. Especially since a review of your user talk page shows it to be a firehose of warnings and sanctions for disruption, especially in "human group conflict" topics. Anyone with in this much trouble centered on "your people vs. my people" conflicts is not likely to provide very useful input into how WP should write about much matters.
 —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:03, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

It is true, though. Of the eight examples of usage for that sense of "red man, n." in the Oxford English Dictionary, between 1740 and 2003, only two have capitalized "red" and both are 18th century; all the more modern examples are lower case. Similarly, the same dictionary's entry on "yellow peril, n." also suggests lower case was more prevalent between 1895 and 2006, with fourteen examples and only two instances capitalized. Likewise, "oriental, n." (NB headword in lowercase in all instances) and "oriental rug, n." are not generally capitalized, and the editors even note: "Use of oriental in this sense to designate a person is now usually avoided" (NB case). GPinkerton ( talk) 22:37, 29 November 2020 (UTC)

Been over this already several times. No one ever argued that any of these terms were always capitalized. The entire point of this discussion is that they are sometimes capitalized, so it is obviously not wrong to do so. Lower-casing has often been done with specific intent, and even more with general and oblivious effect, of pejorative implication. Lower-casing "black" and "white" produces (in proximity to capitalized ethno-racial terms like "Latino", "Asian", etc.) a strong impression for the reader that the groups labeled with the lower-case terms are being denigrated. This problem does not magically go away just because you don't prefer the obvious solution.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:16, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

References