It’s gotten incredibly common: in the same sentence in supposedly literate websites, “Black” as a skin color is consistently capitalized, while “brown,” “white,” “yellow” and so on are consistently in lower case, sometimes in the same sentence. The racial discrimination is so obvious it’s plainly intentional. What purpose does it serve?

Is it to tell us that “Black” people are the Master Race, while others are subordinate? That would be silly. Is it to provoke and anger people, so they’ll say something intemperate and open themselves to accusations of racism? I’ve often thought that, but a complex intention like that makes no sense.

The best explanation I can come up with is that discriminatory typography gives them, so to speak, membership in a club. Using it proves they’re “one of the boys” (regardless of their sex). At the same time, it diminishes their credibility. Readers are apt to think that an article which is biased in its typography is also biased in its content. This isn’t necessarily fair, since the writers for major websites don’t usually choose the typographic standards, but readers have to judge what they see, not what the author submitted.

This sometimes frustrates me when I’m looking for sources to cite. On several occasions I’ve read pieces about police or other government agencies doing bad things to black people and thought about posting a link. But if the article uses discriminatory typography, I have to wonder whether it has also used discriminatory selection of facts. I’ll look for other sources which don’t have that problem. Sometimes I find them, and sometimes I don’t. If a story has only a single source, it’s best to be cautious anyway. A website that puts pleasing noisy people over even-handed treatment in its typography is less likely to be reliable about anything. The sad thing is that this makes reports of real injustices less credible.

Skin color should be lower case. Upper case places undue importance on it, treating it like nationality. But I don’t care that much if you use upper or lower case; just be consistent. There’s no such thing as “good” racial discrimination.

Any comments trying to put the blame on black people as a class rather than on the people running the websites will be unceremoniously deleted.

Update: Here’s an article by Thomas Dalrymple on the issue. “The supposition that by capitalising the word black, but not the word white, some benefit is being conferred on black people is both condescending and demeaning to the supposed beneficiaries. Among other things, it supposes that they are defined purely or largely by how others refer to them in newspapers or other publications. It suggests that they can, and indeed need to, be rescued or saved by the merest gesture of those higher in the social scale than they.”