Torstar opts for systemic racism in style guide

Vincent J. Curtis

27 June 20

On Saturday, June 26, Spectator publisher Paul Berton announced that Torstar papers were going to follow new AP style guidelines and capitalize the letter B in black and I in indigenous when referring to black people and aboriginal people.  (Note: aboriginal will remain uncapitalized.)  In addition, the w in white and b brown will remain lower case when referring to white and brown people respectively.  Note the systemtic racism inherent in this latest surrender to the P.C. mob, but never mind.  Mr. Berton enthusiastically embraced the change, even though Trostar had rejected such changes previously, on the ground that that was then and this is now.  He also referred to another Torstar editor's enthusiastic surrentder made previously on another matter and the justification for that bend-over.

I sent Mr Berton the note below, and as of this posting have yet to hear from him.

Mr. Berton;

If the rule now is that black and indigenous are to be capitalized, regardless of the reason why, capitalizing those words turns them into substantives.  Them’s the rules of grammar.

So, why in the story “Toronto cop guilty of beating” do we find in paragraph 1 the expression “Black teen?”  Shouldn’t it read “teen Black?”  or “teenaged Black?”  The substantive is the important word, the noun that takes the adjectives.  The story could have been carried equally well had the victim been described as a teen, which means that Black (the substantive) was not substantive at all in the story.

I suppose a counter-example would be “Canadian teen” versus “teenaged Canadian,” but “Canadian” is an authentic, substantive category of people.  Turning Black and Indigenous into substantives equivalent of Canadian, you make race essential rather than incidental.  But if race is essential rather than incidental, then leaving white and brown lower case means that race is not essential but incidental in those cases,  There can be only one explanation for this disparity in treatment..

With all this uninformed talk of systemic racism, the print media seems to be falling into it themselves in an effort to please.

And that means there’s a good kind of systemic racism and a bad kind of systemic racism.   (Where have I heard that argued before?)

Old-fashioned liberalism treated race as incidental, and I think that’s still the best policy.  And I’m sure there are editors rolling in their graves at the subversive editorializing being slipped into news stories with this selective capitalization.

Regards;

Vincent J. Curtis

P.S. “Why not, given how much it matters to those who care deeply about how the media depicts and names them.”  Think about that.  I haven’t heard such a soft-headed excuse by a responsible person in a while.  Either she is hiding a political agenda behind this excuse, or she fails to grasp that maybe print media has standards of its own to meet, and these aren’t subject to the deep cares of an illiterate mob.  Would she bend over similarly at the deep care in which the Chinese communists take the way they are depicted?
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