The Columbia University School of Journalism is supposedly the best journalism school in the US. But it sure can produce convoluted, contradictory, illogical agitprop.
A case in point is its 2020 rationale for capitalizing “Black” but not “white” when the words refer to race. The grammatical inconsistency has now been thoughtlessly copied by news media and publications of all sorts, including scholarly ones.
For example, a new book, a scholarly 736-page history of Mexico, does the same (Mexico, a 500-Year History, by Paul Gillingham). In reading the book and wondering why a brilliant author would succumb to the group-think, I did some internet research and came across Columbia’s rationale.
It was easy to tell from the first paragraph that the 847-word rationale was going to go off the rails and sink into a swamp of political correctness, pieties, paternalism, pabulum, and pandering. To wit:
At 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.
So, if this Italian American capitalizes White, I’m following the lead of White supremacists instead of simply using what I believe is correct grammar?
By that reasoning, if White supremacists eat grits, and if you were to also eat them, that would mean that you feel a kinship to the supremacists.
No wonder the aforementioned brilliant author succumbed to the convention. It was either that or be seen as having sympathies for supremacists.
Would those be the same supremacists who lynched eleven Italians in New Orleans, who wanted Italians in the South to attend “Negro” schools, and who thought that Italians were one small step up from Negroes? (“Negro” was of course the word used back then in reference to blacks, er, Blacks.)
Yeah, right, Italians are sympatico with White supremacists.
Italians were also known as dagos, wops, guineas, goombahs, greasers and papists. Since these words reflected a shared sense of identity and community, should they be capitalized? Or maybe Italians should demand that they be called Olives, with the “O” capitalized.
That’s not an abstract point to me. My ancestral roots go back to the hilly Italian section of St. Louis, a close-knit community that continued to be called Dago Hill throughout my teenage years.
Columbia seems to think that all Blacks have a shared sense of identity and community, as if Sudanese immigrants in Minneapolis have the same culture and perspective as the descendants of slaves in Birmingham.
Actually, even descendants of slaves in the deep South have different perspectives. To that point, I had asked a Black friend who was born and raised in humble circumstances in the deep South for his opinion of Columbia’s rationale. His conclusion: “This capitalization rationale is nonsense.”
At the same time, Columbia seems to be saying that Whites don’t have a shared sense of identity and community, and thus don’t deserve to be capitalized. This runs counter, however, to the claim of pseudo intellectuals and best-selling authors that all Whites are uniformly racist, oppressive, privileged, insensitive, fragile, and stained by their ancestors’ sins of slavery and colonialism.
That insulting stereotype is hammered into impressionable brains on college campuses, causing intellectual damage that lasts a lifetime.
Speaking of intellectual damage, there is even a cockamamie belief among some racial radicals that math and proper English are tools that small “w” whites use to keep themselves in power.
To that, I say: Mettiti i fagioli cannellini nel naso; or in English, Put cannellini beans up your nose.
Oh, oh! Because cannellini beans are white (small “w”), Columbia would probably accuse me of dog whistling to White supremacists. On reflection, I should have referred to black beans or kidney beans or refried beans.
The US government has taken racial bean-counting to another level. It has concocted seven racial categories: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, North African/Middle Eastern, and Native American.
Columbia is essentially saying that all of the categories should be capitalized but the first one.
Of course, the seven categories are somewhat arbitrary and not discrete or homogeneous. In reality, the seven mask the fact that there are hundreds if not thousands of distinct ethnocultural groups around the world. Go here for a list.
Not only that, but people from the various groups have been mixing their genes for thousands of years, including many that crisscrossed the Italian peninsula. After all, Italy is only 87 miles from North Africa. Yet the all-knowing American government, seems to believe that genes from North Africa never made it to Italy, or vice versa. Apparently, the categorizers never heard of the Roman Empire, the Carthaginian Empire, the Punic Wars between them, and Hannibal and his elephants.
Columbia does make a valid point that the descendants of slaves don’t know their ethnic or tribal ancestry. They were not only stripped of their ancestral identity but given new labels by Whites, such as Negro, colored, African American, and the linguistic obscenity, “people of color.” As such, they came up with their own identification of Black.
Okay, but that still doesn’t explain why Black should be capitalized but white shouldn’t. The glaring inconsistency suggests that something else is behind this.
For sure, intellectual honesty is not behind it.
Mr. Cantoni can be reached at [email protected].
Be the first to comment