To ‘B’ or not to ‘b’ — that is the question
Recently, President Donald Trump tried to explain an aspect of the Black experience to Fox News’ Harris Faulkner, a Black woman. “I think I’ve done more for the Black community than any other president,” Mr. Trump said. “And let’s take a pass on Abraham Lincoln, because he did good, although it’s always questionable, you know, in other words, the end result.”
We’re used to Mr. Trump saying nonsensical things and resorting to non sequiturs to dig himself out of a jam, but it will always cause Black people’s hearts to seize up whenever a U.S. president throws even a little shade on what many consider Lincoln’s greatest achievement. What was the “good” that was “always questionable” about the ending of the Civil War that freed Blacks from slavery?
Because Ms. Faulkner is selfaware enough to see herself on a future auction block if things get out of hand with white folks again, she rushed to fill Mr. Trump’s pregnant pause with what should’ve been an unnecessary history lesson. “Well, we are free, Mr. President,” she said. “He [Lincoln] did pretty well.”
You could almost see the gears in Mr. Trump’s head turning to form a pithy rejoinder like: “Yeah, old Honest Abe may have freed the slaves, but I’m the one who gave the blacks jobs.”
Instead, Mr. Trump shook his head like a third grader urged to repeat a particularly tricky stretch of the multiplication table. “We are free,” he repeated not at all persuasively. “Well, you understand what I mean? You know, I got to take a pass on a Honest Abe, as we call it.”
Coming from this president, taking “a pass on a Honest Abe, as we call it” is not only going to sound like gibberish but also ominous given his very tenuous understanding of American history and his contempt for civil rights.
This very strange exchange may have been the final straw that led to the unexpected resignation of Mary Elizabeth Taylor, the highest-ranking African American woman in the Trump administration, last week.
Ms. Taylor, 30, a lifelong Republican from a long line of Black Republicans, submitted a five-paragraph resignation letter that contained the following: “Moments of upheaval can change you, shift the trajectory of your life, and mold your character. The President’s comments and actions surrounding racial injustice and Black Americans cut sharply against my core values and convictions. I must follow the dictates of my conscience and resign as Assistant Secretary of Legislative Affairs.”
Ms. Taylor resigned days before Mr. Trump “whitesplained” Juneteenth in an embarrassing interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I did something good,” Mr. Trump said explaining his decision to shift his first planned rally in months to the next day to undercut accusations that his campaign is racially insensitive. “I made it famous. I made Juneteenth very famous. It’s actually an important event; it’s an important time,” Mr. Trump said.
“But nobody had heard of it. Very few people have heard of it. Actually, a young African American Secret Service agent knew what it was. I had political people who had no idea,” Mr. Trump said, oblivious to how idiotic his boast sounded and how it indicted his advisers as being as out-of-touch as he is. It was like
Christopher Columbus “discovering” a place where millions of people lived and died for countless generations indifferent to the colonial aspirations of Spain and Portugal.
While Mr. Trump rushed to take credit for popularizing a holiday millions of African Americans have celebrated without his knowledge or input since 1865, it was left to the president’s aides to explain why the Trump campaign picked Tulsa, Okla., for the rally 99 years after a white riot killed hundreds of Blacks and destroyed their prosperous community then located less than a mile away from the convention center.
While no one will ever accuse Mr. Trump of being “ahead of his time” racially, the opposite is usually always true, though he firmly believes his bigotry is capable of imparting insight. That’s why whitesplaining African American history has suddenly become his forte. Thanks to Mr. Trump, we now know that Frederick Douglass is alive, Candace Owens and Kanye West are credible civil rights leaders and that he has always had a good relationship with “the blacks.”
We all owe Mr. Trump a debt of gratitude for one thing — making “the blacks” with that hard “b” in “blacks” he likes to utter and the definite article used in conjunction with it part of a national discussion. In my occupation, that conversation has evolved into something extraordinarily good in recent weeks.
Of course, whenever Mr. Trump refers to “the blacks” or “the gays” or “the Hispanics,” he is trying to “otherize” them with the folks he considers the default mode for Americans — white people. It is stupid and transparently racist, but it hints at a question of etymology and the power of word choice a vanguard of Black journalists, especially copy editors have been arguing with publishers about for decades — capitalizing the first letter in “Blacks” to differentiate a mere color in a box of crayons from a plethora of cultures spanning the width and breadth of a worldwide diaspora.
Last week, The Associated Press, The New York Times, USA Today and hundreds of local newspapers across the country announced that its news organizations would now capitalize the B in “Black.” This is in response to a revolutionary moment in our national politics when idols are being torn down and the status quo is being questioned ferociously, but it also a much delayed concession to common sense. Like the battle to capitalize the “N” in “Negro” a century ago, this was a battle with a Jim Crow mentality that has internalized disrespect for Blacks as part of journalistic orthodoxy.
There has never been a good reason to not capitalize “Blacks,” but there have been plenty of sentimental and racist reasons for not giving hundreds of millions of Blacks the same respect accorded to other ethnic groups in newspapers. And, quite frankly, I’m tired of using the cumbersome term “African American” when I really want to say “Blacks.” It covers a lot more territory and takes up a lot less space in a sentence.
If Mr. Trump, in all of his bloviating ignorance, wants to take credit for this one, he will be equally wrong about being the impetus for change, but he can take solace in the fact he helped spark a counter-revolution that can be felt from the ballot box to the way news stories will be written in most newspapers going forward for decades.