Fiddling around with linguistics does nothing to eradicate racism

The incessant renaming of races, ethnicities and identities is not the way to combat hate and prejudice

Up front, let’s concede that this column’s peg is of nominal importance. Yet last week’s announcement that The New York Times will hereafter capitalise “black” when “describing people and cultures of African origin” is nevertheless a window on the genuflections of the moment.

In a statement explaining the policy change, the editorial decision is portrayed as a direct result of the George Floyd protests last month. The typographical tweak is an inexpensive – one is tempted to say cheap – gesture, if only to soothe the products of university identity politics who’ve all but taken over America’s purported “paper of record”. The upper-casing of “black” is an act of relatively effortless pandering, both to young woke staff, and to the larger Black Lives Matter movement. What the change does not do, of course, is remotely improve the lot of black people in real terms or diminish prejudice a whit.

In-house, “the view was that there was growing agreement in the country to capitalise and that The NYT should not be a hold-out”. In logic, that’s textbook “bandwagon reasoning”. The argument reduces to, “Well, everyone else is doing it!” But other newspapers also publish typos, grammatical errors and factual inaccuracies. Mere eagerness to go along with the crowd hardly befits a storied institution like the NYT.

The paper’s statement of justification is tellingly inconsistent. That capital B “reflects our goal to be respectful of all the people and communities we cover”. But the NYT doesn’t respectfully capitalise the skin colour of any other people and communities it covers. And herein lies the problem. The NYT will still not capitalise “brown” and “white”, whose lower-casing now risks appearing derogatory.

Thus, in print, the popular American expression “Black and brown people” now seems to elevate African-Americans to a higher status than Hispanics. Little wonder that last week the paper also ran a lengthy article about how, in the wake of the BLM protests, Latinos feel less worthy of concern, an impression this fickle capitalisation policy could only intensify.

The editors’ revised style guideline is primarily rationalised with the assertion that a black skin colour represents “a shared culture and history” in a way that other races’ skin colours do not. But the cultures and histories of the massive continent of Africa are, if you will, all over the map. Sub-Saharan peoples vary fantastically in their traditions, religions, languages, cuisines, politics, and pasts. The African diaspora is similarly various. Black Americans, Haitians, Jamaicans, Dominicans, black Britons: are those editors telling us these folks constitute a single cohesive culture?

The NYT declares that “white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does”. But when supporting the claim that white people are specially imbued with “unconscious bias” and specially responsible for “systemic racism”, The

New York Times is happy as Larry to regard folks with European ancestry as sharing a single – damning – culture and history, like it or not.

Indeed, some writers, like the American black academic and activist Cornel West, capitalise not only “black” but “white” in prose. Now, I wouldn’t choose to do so myself. I dislike further emphasising the importance of a minor physical distinction that I’d love for us all to get beyond. But at least West’s also capitalising “white” is grammatically consistent, diplomatically evenhanded, and indicative of reciprocal regard. The NYT notes that “hate groups” capitalise “white”. Yet you can bet any “hate group” worth its salt does not capitalise “black”, and at this painfully progressive point the danger of The New York Times being mistaken for Breitbart is zero.

Woefully, back in Britain, the acronym BAME continues to proliferate. I sympathise with the many “Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic” Britons who are averse to being mashed indiscriminately with wildly disparate communities. Long beloved of the Civil Service, this awful concoction for “non-white” was invented by the Socialist Workers Party and didn’t evolve organically from the ground up. My personal objection to the contrivance is aesthetic. The sound of the word is awful. Pronounced as a unisyllabic adjective, it recalls some hick nickname in a stereotypical backwater of the American South.

Oh, and in what was once the land of the free, yet another racial catchall has arisen from this dizzying merrygo-round of conformist nomenclatural faddism: BIPOC, pronounced as two syllables, and short for “Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour”. The American construction “people of colour”, which encompassed all these groups, at least had the merit of inclusivity. Readily confused with “biopic”, “Bipoc” has the ring of a petrochemical company. Its sole redeeming quality is that it’s not “Bame”.

I can’t be the only one who’s exhausted by this incessant renaming of races, ethnicities, and identities. We’re constantly battered by new awkward attempts to cram the first letters of a list into a pronounceable acronym, and now we’re to reverently but irrationally capitalise ordinary adjectives that grammatically belong in lower case. We’re always worried that we didn’t get the memo, and what was acceptable last week is insulting on Monday.

Most of us are glad to oblige, and in the interest of expressing respect try to call people what they want to be called. For years now I’ve stuck with the term “minorities”, whose neutral proportionality has so far (touch wood) rendered the noun timelessly inoffensive. And as noted, capitalising “black” is a relatively small matter – an inconsistency, but one that doesn’t do much harm.

Yet it also doesn’t do much good. It’s time to face the fact that the semantic address of social grievance doesn’t work.

‘What the change does not do, of course, is remotely improve the lot of black people in real terms or diminish prejudice a whit’

Lionel Shriver’s most recent novel, “The Motion of the Body Through Space”, was published in May