{"id":38418,"date":"2014-11-19T20:45:39","date_gmt":"2014-11-19T20:45:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=38418"},"modified":"2014-11-19T20:45:39","modified_gmt":"2014-11-19T20:45:39","slug":"the-case-for-black-with-a-capital-b","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=38418","title":{"rendered":"The Case for Black With a Capital B"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Case for Black With a Capital B<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2014-11-18<\/p>\n

Lori L. Tharps<\/strong><\/a>, Associate Professor of Journalism
\nTemple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania<\/em><\/p>\n

PHILADELPHIA \u2014 I WAS sitting in my office at Temple University when I overheard an exchange between a colleague and his student. The student had come to see her professor to go over a paper, and he was patiently explaining that the abundance of grammatical mistakes detracted from her compelling content. I sympathized with my colleague as he pointed out error after error. Until he came to this one.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy did you capitalize black and white people?\u201d he asked. \u201cI thought I\u2019d seen it written that way before,\u201d the girl stammered. \u201cCome on,\u201d he said. \u201cWhy would you capitalize black or white?\u201d…<\/p>\n

…After emancipation<\/a>, as many individuals replaced their slave surnames with ones of their own devising, like Freedman or Freeman, they still bore the painful legacy of the labels they\u2019d been given: black, negro and colored.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t only Black people who didn\u2019t know what to call the nearly four million newly freed citizens of the United States. The government itself fumbled its way through names, categories and labels for Black people. Between 1850 and 1920, the United States census classified those of African descent as black, negro, mulatto<\/a>, quadroon<\/a> or octoroon<\/a> \u2014 depending on the visual assessment of the census taker. By 1930, the Census Bureau offered just one of these categories: negro.<\/p>\n

This wasn\u2019t solely an issue of identity politics. In a 2008 article on the census<\/a> for Studies in American Political Development<\/em><\/a>, Jennifer L. Hochschild<\/a> and Brenna M. Powell<\/a> wrote, \u201cOver the course of almost a century, the U.S. government groped its way through extensive experimentation \u2014 reorganizing and reimaging the racial order, with corresponding impact on individuals\u2019 and groups\u2019 life chances.\u201d These names matter…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Case for Black With a Capital B The New York Times 2014-11-18 Lori L. Tharps, Associate Professor of Journalism Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania PHILADELPHIA \u2014 I WAS sitting in my office at Temple University when I overheard an exchange between a colleague and his student. The student had come to see her professor to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,459,6940,20],"tags":[17955,17956,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-38418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-history","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-lori-l-tharps","tag-lori-tharps","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}