by Gene Kizer, Jr.
The Associated Press, one of the most leftist institutions in America, is now also racist.
In fact, it has skipped racist and gone straight to Nazi.
The associated press now capitalizes the word “black” when talking about black people, but does not capitalize the word “white” when talking about white people.1
As a result of the associated press’s obsession with race and bigotry against white people, I can no longer capitalize the words “associated press” or its “stylebook” or any other words or initials associated with the a p.
In fact, I will use the abbreviation “ass. press” for the associated press, from now on.
The ass. press started capitalizing black June 19, but did not make a decision on capitalizing white at the time. They wanted to think about it. 2
But in the past few days they have made the deliberate decision not to capitalize white.
Their racist instructions are published in the ass. press’s famous stylebook, which has enormous influence in the world of writing and publishing.3
Capitalizing the adjective black, but not white, looks weird in sentences and seems very unliterary and unprofessional, like something Louis Farrakhan would do in his mosque newsletter.
Here are a couple examples from an ass. press story in the Charleston Post and Courier, July 6, 2020:4
That includes white people from other parts of the country, Black families returning generations after the Great Migration north . . . . Harrison noted that even younger native Southerners, Black and white, are less wed to hard-partisan identities . . . .
Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were native Southerners who, with whiter, less urban electorates, attracted white moderates and Black voters.
The bias of the ass. press is nothing new. Its reporters are required to have a copy of the Democrat Party Stylebook on their desk next to their copy of Das Kapital, Rules for Radicals, The Communist Manifesto, and their pictures of George Soros, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, so they can portray, what is to them, an “unbiased” perspective.
The concept of unbiased journalism and knowing American history before writing about it, is foreign to the ass. press because that’s not how they do it in New York.
In New York, they do it like The New York Times’ 1619 Project whose founder, Nikole Hannah-Jones, called the white race “the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world. . . . Christopher Columbus and those like him were no different than Hitler.”5
She still won a Pulitzer Prize from another bunch of PC northeast liberals for her fake history that asserts that America is so bad, even the Revolutionary War was fought so white supremacist colonists could keep their slaves, even though there is not a shred of evidence of that.
I mean, there is not even a molecule of evidence. There is no writing, no document, no nothing, by a single person.
In other words, it is unsourced fake history, like much of the unsourced fake news in The New York Times.
The intelligence of people in New York is already suspect after twice electing Bill de Blasio mayor.
Unfortunately for Hannah-Jones and The New York Times, a Southerner named Thomas Jefferson wrote this little thing called the Declaration of Independence outlining exactly what the colonists were fighting for and why, and nowhere does it state that they were concerned about the British ending slavery in the American colonies. Not a single word even implies such an absurdity.
The Declaration of Independence says things like:
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,–That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
That was the most widely quoted phrase of Southerners in the secession debate in the South in the year prior to their seceding.
The 1619 Project, while bringing up some good points such as Abraham Lincoln’s racism and desire to ship black people back to Africa or somewhere away from America where they’d have a chance to survive, has been heavily criticized by historians and is not credible.
It is highly regrettable that it is in hundreds of schools. That must come to an end without major historical corrections to the 1619 Project, which Hannah-Jones is unlikely to make, especially now that she has Oprah Winfrey and all her money and movie making behind her.
Also, in fairness to Abraham Lincoln, he was a man of his time. There was nothing out of the ordinary about his way of thinking about race.
By the 19th century, the white civilization of Europe that started with the Greeks and Romans, was well established here, based on capitalism, science, technology, freedom and opportunity.
It was just too different from the tribal civilizations of Africa. It would take a while for all Americans to look upon each other as equals. That’s just human nature.
Despite slavery, race relations were still better in the South than anywhere in America. Alexis de Tocqueville said, in Democracy in America, that race relations were bad in places where slavery had been abolished, and the worst in places that had never had slavery.
Despite the odds, some free black people did well during the time of slavery and many more did well afterward. William Ellison, the famous black cotton gin maker from Sumter County, South Carolina was well respected and owned over 60 slaves before the war.
Of course opportunity for blacks, with all the turmoil of Reconstruction, was severely limited for a long time, but the promise of the Declaration of Independence was there and today opportunity is unlimited for everybody in America, which is why people from all over the world will risk everything to get here.
I know that doesn’t fit with the left’s victimology politics but those who reject the false narrative of systemic racism, which Dr. Thomas Sowell said does not exist and is like the propaganda tactics of Hitler and Goebbels,6 can succeed wildly in America.
The only thing holding anybody down is their own mind. As Henry Ford said, whether you think you can do a thing, or not, you are right.
American history has been politicized since the 1960s and Southern history is the worst.
The ass. press is despicable on Southern history. Like the great historian, Eugene Genovese, said, the fake history pushed by the ass. press and other liberals is a “cultural and political atrocity” that has been forced on the public by an academic and media elite.7
The ass. press is not concerned with truth. It is concerned with leftist politics.
Many of the articles on the recent riots are fake news. They portray the demonstrators as peaceful while buildings burn in the background. Much of this mayhem is caused by anarchists who hate America and want it to crumble.
If it really did crumble, they would regret it because at some point, the public is not going to put up with it any more.
Thank God we have a Second Amendment, though the left and Democrat Party hate it and have done everything they can to weaken or destroy it so that the public will be at the mercy of violent Democrat Party mobs.
To the dumb ass. press, everybody who lived before today is a white supremacist even though they were regular people living in their times, working, raising families, fighting in the nation’s wars.
Real historians know that you can’t use today’s standards to judge the people of the past. To the people of the past, it was their present. You have to judge people of the past within the context of their own times.
Anything else is not history but filthy politics.
The woke crowd is at total war with the past. There are unlimited opportunities for the left to dig up instances of hate and abuse from centuries ago and use it to promote hate and abuse today for some political advantage.
Anybody the ass. press wants to slander, they slander, with the most sweeping generalizations you can imagine. The ass. press promotes hate for the political advantage of Democrats.
In an article entitled “Historical figures under attack following death of George Floyd” on June 12, 2020, the ass. press wrote:
Protests and, in some cases, acts of vandalism have taken place in such cities as Boston; New York; Paris; Brussels; and Oxford, England, in an intense re-examination of racial injustices over the centuries. Scholars are divided over whether the campaign amounts to erasing history or updating it.8
An “intense re-examination of racial injustices over the centuries”?
What the hell is the mob examining?
Nobody alive today did anything two centuries ago that the mob needs to avenge today.
Nobody alive today did anything to hold black people down. Nobody alive today operated a slave ship. Most people are appalled at slavery.
Many of us just want the truth told. The South gets blamed for slavery but New England Yankees brought all the slaves here with help from the British before them.
Boston’s Peter Faneuil, of Faneuil Hall, the Cradle of Liberty, was a major slave trader helping the economy of Boston enormously in its early days. One of his slave ships was the Jolly Batchelor but it wasn’t too jolly for the poor Africans he forced into the horrendous Middle Passage and a life of slavery.
And New York City, together with the aforementioned Boston, loved slavery and slave trading so much that they were the largest ports for the slave trade on the planet in 1862, a year into the War Between the States, and 54 years after the slave trade had been outlawed by the United States Constitution.9 They continued slave trading until the last country, Brazil, abolished slavery in 1888.
Six slave states fought for the North the entire war: Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and West Virginia, which came into the Union as a slave state during the war. They were among the last to end slavery, and two had slaves until the 13th Amendment finally freed them in December, 1865, months after the war.
Four of the Southern states that seceded – Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas and Tennessee – in which 52.4% of white Southerners lived, seceded over nothing to do with slavery. They did not secede until Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South, then Virginia seceded immediately, followed in weeks by the other three.
Doesn’t matter anyway.
The South had the right to secede and they did so properly. No historian will deny the right of secession so every accusation you hear that Confederates were traitors is a fraud. Real historians know this. President Eisenhower knew it which is why he had a picture of General Robert E. Lee in his office the whole eight years he was president. Gen. Lee’s honor and courage no doubt inspired Gen. Eisenhower to win World War II, as he said.
We are not having an “intense re-examination of racial injustices over the centuries.” That is absurd. All we are having is criminal activity that weak Democrat mayors tolerate and encourage, then excuse, by saying it is an “intense re-examination of racial injustices” therefore you better give me what I want politically. All of the cities with riots are liberal cities with liberal Democrat mayors. That’s what’s in store for the rest of America if Democrats ever rule again.
The ass. press is ignorant of Southern history in most cases, and deliberately tells lies in others. In that same article quoted above, they wrote:
The Davis monument and many others across the South were erected decades after the Civil War during the Jim Crow era, when states imposed tough new segregation laws, and during the Lost Cause movement, in which historians and others sought to recast the South’s rebellion as a noble undertaking, fought to defend not slavery but states’ rights.
That is a popular technique of the propagandists in the news media and especially the ass. press. They falsely equate monument construction with Jim Crow, which is a fraud.
Over 750,000 people died in the War Between the States and over 1,000,000 were maimed out of a total national population of only 32 million (23 million in the North, nine million in the South, of which 4 million were slaves, so, what you really had was five million Southerners in an agricultural society against 23 million Northerners with unlimited immigration in an industrial society that had an overwhelming advantage in weapon manufacturing, railroads, an army, navy, solid financial system, etc.). Southerners had to start everything from scratch.
Contrast that with World War II when we had a national population of around 150 million, yet only 400,000 were killed, and 650,000 wounded.
That’s 750,000 killed out of a population of 32 million verses 400,000 killed out of a population of 150 million.
The South was almost entirely destroyed. It took 75 years for the South to recover, and 94.3% of white Southerners did not own slaves. Would 94.3% of Southerners sacrifice all that so 5.7% could keep their slaves?
Hell no.
Every Confederate monument went up for the most noble reason, to honor war dead after a devastating war. Not a one went up to proclaim the ass. press’s fantasy of white supremacy.
What’s happened today with Confederate monuments is the most disgraceful period of American history, led by the ass. press and rest of the liberal media. I hope history judges them harshly.
Read any of the 40 years of the original Confederate Veteran magazine and you will see that every single penny that was raised came from school children, raffles, bake sales and such, in an impoverished region. That is how the monuments went up, and both whites and blacks loved them.
Today’s hatred is a construct of the hate-monger leftist media led by the ass. press and the Democrat Party.
If slavery was the true cause of the war, it would have ended in a few months because nobody would sacrifice that much death and destruction so 5.7% could own slaves, but all of them would fight to the death for independence just as the colonists were willing to do.
Besides, Southerners could have negotiated an end to the war and kept their slaves anytime within the first two years of the war (and probably after that) if they had wanted to. Lincoln was fine with that.
Southerners were fighting for independence and all that meant, and Northerners were fighting for Union as Abraham Lincoln said over and over. The reason Northerners were fighting for Union was because all their enormous wealth and power was tied to the Union.
They would rather take what they wanted than have to compete against the South with 100% control of the most demanded commodity on the planet, cotton, and strengthened greatly by military and trade alliances with Great Britain and the rest of Europe.
In such a scenario, the North could not have beaten the South, and Lincoln knew it. That’s why he started his war as quickly as he could, then set up a naval blockade.
In two bald-faced lies in one paragraph, the ass. press wrote in an article “Confederate battle flag losing prominence 155 years after Civil War” on July 1, 2020:
Georgia – which added the battle emblem to its state flag in 1956 in response to U.S. Supreme Court decisions to desegregate public schools – adopted a flag without a rebel banner in 2003.10
In the first lie, the adding of the Confederate battle flag to the Georgia state flag in 1956 did not have one iota to do with school desegregation. I had some correspondence with the man responsible, Judge John Salmons Bell, who changed the flag because the old Confederate veterans were dying out and he had attended Confederate veteran reunions when he was a boy. He was proud of his family that fought for the South.
Also, the centennial of the War Between the States was coming up and President Eisenhower had directed the states to prepare their commemorations. This was on the minds of people back then.
Those like the ass. press who say the flag was changed in Georgia in defiance to integration can provide no proof of that, and if it was true, there would be a ton of proof because people in those days had no problems making racist statements when they felt like it.
In the second lie, the Georgia state flag adopted in 2003, is not, as the ass. press says, “without a rebel banner” but is almost exactly a rebel banner, the Stars and Bars, the first Confederate national flag. (See pictures of both flags at the bottom of this article, below the endnotes).
The liars in the ass. press and other media have said South Carolina also raised the Confederate battle flag above its State House in the early 1960s in defiance to integration.
It wasn’t true. The man responsible for flying the battle flag over the South Carolina State House was John Amasa May, a legislator from Aiken County and a World War II hero, a Bronze Star winner, lawyer, historian, and head of the Confederate War Centennial Commission in South Carolina.
The battle flag went up over the South Carolina State House to honor the 40,000 out of 60,000 South Carolina Confederate soldiers who were killed or wounded in the war. Around 20,000 were killed.
Again, the ass. press is a filthy liar as are most in the media when it comes to Southern history. Just like Genovese said, a media and academic elite have turned the history of the South into a “cultural and political atrocity.”
The ass. press is a racist.
They know by capitalizing black, and not capitalizing white, they are building up black people who vote Democrat as they do, and they are demeaning whites, which is revenge for what Northern slave traders, and slaveholders in the North and South did 150 years ago, but nobody who has lived in the past century has done.
In a June 30, 2020 article “Many newsrooms are now capitalizing the B in black. Here are some of the people who made that happen”, Aly Colon is quoted from 2003 saying:
To me, it’s an issue of respect, fairness, equality, and parity. When we use a lowercase letter it makes the word less visible, less prominent, and maybe less important. It’s the diminutive form. My name is written with an upper case ‘A’ and ‘C’ for “Aly Colon.” I consider that a sign of respect.11
Only a virulent, vile racist would divide our country over a racial issue like this at a time when we are already so divided.
The ass. press doesn’t care. They think it helps the Democrat Party politically and that’s enough.
Capitalizing black is fine as long as white and brown are also capitalized so it shows proper respect for all Americans.
You saw earlier in the two examples from the newspaper how stupid it looks to have black capitalized and white in lower case in the same sentence. It is improper English to capitalize adjectives like that but if everybody is treated the same, then fine.
However, capitalizing black and deliberately not capitalizing white is a racist statement, which makes the ass. press a racist as well as an historically ignorant purveyor of fake news.
When you see black capitalized in an article, and white not capitalized, you know that article is written by virtue signaling racists and that is the viewpoint it is written from.
Newspapers don’t have to follow the ass. press’s lead.
Fox News will capitalize both black and white.
Others like me will continue to use proper English and not capitalize either.
If I do decide to capitalize something in the future, all will be capitalized, black, white and brown, because I believe all Americans are equal, and we should come together as a great nation whenever we can.
All decent people should encourage that, and not do like the ass. press and promote racial hate and division.
1 “ap changes writing style to capitalize “b” in Black”, June 19, 2020, https://apnews.com/71386b46dbff8190e71493a763e8f45a, accessed 7-14-20; “The decision to capitalize Black” by john daniszewski, vice president for standards, June 19, 2020, https://blog.ap.org/announcements/the-decision-to-capitalize-black, accessed 7-20-20; “Why we will lowercase white” by john daniszewski, vice president for standards, https://blog.ap.org/announcements/why-we-will-lowercase-white, accessed 7-22-20; “The associated press announced it will not capitalize W in white” by Eliana Miller, July 20, 2020, https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2020/the-associated-press-announced-it-will-not-capitalize-w-in-white, accessed 7-20-20.
2 “The decision to capitalize Black” by john daniszewski, vice president for standards, June 19, 2020, https://blog.ap.org/announcements/the-decision-to-capitalize-black, accessed 7-20-20.
3 ap stylebook, 55th edition, https://store.stylebooks.com/2020-ap-stylebook-print-edition.html, accessed 7-22-20.
4 “Democrats, Biden look to accelerate Southern political shift”, associated press story by Bill Barrow in the Charleston Post and Courier, July 6, 2020.
5 “In Racist Screed, NYT’s 1619 Project Founder Calls ‘White Race’ ‘Barbaric Devils,’ ‘Bloodsuckers,’ Columbia ‘No Different Than Hitler'”, June 25, 2020 by Jordan Davidson, https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/25/in-racist-screed-nyts-1619-project-founder-calls-white-race-barbaric-devils-bloodsuckers-no-different-than-hitler, accessed 7-8-20.
6 Fox News, Life, Liberty and Levin, July 12, 2020, “Thomas Sowell on ‘utter madness’ of defund the police push, wonders whether US is reaching point of no return” https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/thomas-sowell-on-utter-madness-of-defund-the-police-push-wonders-whether-us-is-reaching-point-of-no-return, accessed July 14, 2020.
7 Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Tradition, The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), Preface, xi-xii.
8 “Historical figures under attack following death of George Floyd”, June 12, 2020, ass. press story in the Charleston, SC Post and Courier.
9 W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 179.
10 “Confederate battle flag losing prominence 155 years after Civil War”, July 1, 2020, ass. press article in the Charleston, SC Post and Courier.
11 June 30, 2020 article “Many newsrooms are now capitalizing the B in black. Here are some of the people who made that happen” by Kristen Hare, June 30, 2020, https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2020/many-newsrooms-are-now-capitalizing-the-b-in-black-here-are-some-of-the-people-who-made-that-happen/, accessed 7-22-20.
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Gene, another fine and educational, thought provoking article. There is such a bias in the media I often wonder if it is a sinister plot, or just ignorance of a great magnitude. I think probably both.
One of our local historical "experts" made some stupid comments and told a few outright lies recently in front of a Council I was appointed to by our County Commissioners. And, of course, he had to point out that our local Memorial was erected during the Jim Crowe period. I asked him to explain those Jim Crowe policies to me. He started with the usual blather of disenfranchising black voters. I asked if it were not true that there was a poll tax and a literacy test in there. He said there was. So I asked if there were any white folks around back then who could not afford the poll tax. He admitted there was. I asked if there were white folks around back then who could not pass the literacy test. He acknowledged there were. So I next asked him if it were not true then that blacks and whites were disenfranchised, he looked shocked. Then said, maybe, but it affected blacks more than whites. I pushed him til he had to admit blacks and whites were both affected. Then I asked him if that included men and women, he said "Of course." Then I asked how that could be as women were not allowed to vote until the 19th Amendment was ratified on 8/18/1920. Our Memorial was erected in 1912, if I remember correctly. So I asked if it were also true, based on that, if there was a time when black men could vote but white and black women could not. Another shocked look on his face. I pressed him, He had to concede that, yes, during the Jim Crowe period, there were times when black men could vote but white women could not.
He was obviously uncomfortable with my line of thought and questions. However, I also had to explain the Corwin Amendment to him as this particular history "expert" had not heard of it. Sad, especially considering he is the head of a local museum and he gives programs based on the illegal war of northern invasion and other related topics. Of course, that is NOT how hw refers to it. It was all about ending slavery, nothing else.
Bill,
That's absolutely GREAT! Way go, man! You had the perfect questions every step of the way.
That's the way to come back at them.
Thanks so much for your great comment!
Gene
Gene, yet another brilliant, factual, and relevant article! I wasn't aware of the ass. press's new propaganda tactic. I quit reading newspapers several years ago and don't watch TV except for Fox and NewsMax. I don't even watch local news because they lead with the national fake news. Please, please keep up this wonderful work. Quick question: I fly the First National flag from my porch. If the ass. press and their allies get their way and police departments are defunded, who will come drag the dead bodies from my yard?
Garry,
It is hard to believe the ass. press (formerly associated press) would do such a racist thing. What disgusting virtue signaling phonies. They promote hate and division. They need to treat all Americans with respect in their writing but they are eat up with political correctness. The whole world should give them grief and laugh at them and maybe they will stop being so racist and race obsessed.
I guess you'll have have to hire a private firm to remove those dead bodies or set up your own Boot Hill.
I can't see too many police departments defunded in the South but I'm adding to my arsenal just in case.
Thanks for writing!
Gene