by Hermene D. Hartman

Finally, some members of the mainstream news media have come to the conclusion that from now on, they will capitalize the “B” in Black as it refers to Black people.

The editorial stylebook changes are happening at the New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Associated Press, and other major mainstream media outlets in the year 2020.

The mainstream media has not covered Black America equally. They have reported the crime story and our negativity abundantly. Our entertainment and sports figures have been covered with scorecards and creative sounds, but usually, there is a negative connotation.

Miles Davis played his trumpet and turned his back to the audience and was criticized for disrespecting his audience rather than acknowledged for concentrating on his music while playing with a turned back. He was focused.

There is the constant marginalization of the minority, the “less than” factor. For example, “Why is Jesse Jackson Really Running for President?” was a headline. They made him sound insane for thinking of the presidential run that changed modern-day politics and paved the way for the Obama era.

The Black politician takes a constant beating. Not so long ago, the Black man in the major press was identified by his name and race. For example, it was “John Doe, the negro male, robbed the store.” However, the White criminal was not racially identified. This was a major change in the press, to cease racial identification.

I started N'DIGO in November of 1989 out of frustration. In the very first edition, the first editorial, I wrote holds true today like it was written yesterday. “We need a major media voice that speaks to a Black reality, not just the super success stories, not just the outrageous crime and super poor stories. There’s a lot in between. Most are in the middle. The image of Black folk is a concern. Mainstream media coverage of Black Chicago is often limited, stereotyped, imbalanced, and blind.

The high acclaimed Chicago Community Trust Human Relations Task Force: a Report on Race, Ethnic and Religious Tensions in Chicago (September 1989) points this out. They stated some 30 years ago, is “harm done by media stereotyping, such as fueling real estate panic, undermining self-esteem, teaching fear and prejudice and engendering selfishness, fear, and materialism. Most importantly these participations argued that media stereotyping can hinder solution by widening social and cultural rifts.” Mainstream media curiously covers Black people, particularly our politicians. Black reporters in mainstream media cover us curiously, too. Afraid to write and report and afraid not to. They are constantly plagued with “fitting the format.” Black people events with all the gains and increased media coverage are still not reviewed or regarded holistically. Too often we are still considered “minor,” “disadvantaged,” “deprived,” “nontraditional” and/or special.”

“We will quote the word “minority.” N'DIGO will not use it. We will capitalize the B in Black.”

The media has given us stereotypes from Aunt Jemima on the pancake box to Uncle Ben on the rice box to the lawn jockey. These are acceptable, cordial and comfortable images for Whites to accept that they created.

Blacks were portrayed and popularized as servants and dummies. Dark black skin with uniforms and/or strong identifiers like the headscarf wrap were favorable. This imagery transferred to the movies, with Buckwheat and Bo Jangles dancing with Miss Shirley Temple. The Black image has been carefully crafted to demean. Shirley Temple, the child, was always the smart one, showing the elder Bo Jangles the way as he held her precious hand.

The Mammy image is non-threatening and keeps the Black woman in the kitchen in servitude. But then come Lena Horne, Josephine Baker, and Dorothy Dandridge. What do you do with these beige beauties that wore haute couture magnificently well?

All Blacks love watermelon, to the point where some refused to eat the delightful fruit in public. Stepin Fetchit in the movies was slow and retarded and had to scratch his head to remember the simplest of things. Then there was the strong daring Black woman named “Sapphire” and, of course, the most popular of the passives ones was Uncle Tom himself, the docile Black male who often asked master, "How do we feel sir.?"

Somewhere along the way, the image of “lazy” was developed when the reality is that the enslaved were working from sunup to sundown. The Negro image was lazy, dishonest, backward, ignorant, and most importantly dangerous as the males often hung from the tree, as Billie Holiday describes in "Strange Fruit" as the White Picnic was an event after church. Did the major press think this was correct, as they barely covered the sinful acts and Black press wrote about the horrors?

So, White America, what do you do with the intellect of Mr. James Baldwin as he states firmly, “I am not your Negro” and asks why was it necessary for you to create a “nigger” for your self-satisfaction and self-esteem? And for today, why does Dr. Cornel West make Anderson Cooper cry as he addresses race with an open honesty?

What do you do then with the morality voice of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as he questions and challenges the Viet Nam War? You say go back to your ghetto hut and don’t touch White international affairs; stay in your place. King, the scholar with a doctorate could saw the wrong in an unjust, undeclared war. How does The New Yorker magazine portray the Obamas * on the cover as terrorists rather than normal people in casual or in business attire? This was very much a part of the demeaning distortion process.

The capital B is complex, and it is the girdle of systematic and institutionalized racism. You keep us out of the history books; you ignore our stories in magazines unless you find the exploitive edge. Or, you ignore us completely to change the history to fit your stereotype, or you lie, or you give us propaganda about who we are.

The media defines. Then comes Beyoncé, who says to Vogue, I will grace your cover only if I can control the imagery. She chooses a Black photographer, the first to shoot a cover for the fashion pages. With the utmost sophistication, she respectfully portrays southern Blackness in her very own glory.

It is necessary that we have publications such as Black Press, Ebony, Defender, Crusader, and N’DIGO, so we can tell our story from our perspective in a place that humanizes and explains and provides a viewpoint of reality as we live it.

And, by the way, these Black publications have capitalized the N in Negro and the "B" in Black forever, without editorial conference. Maybe, we read the grammar books differently, proper noun equals capitalization. The "W" in White for that matter should also be capitalized when it is used to discuss and describe a people. We don’t say, for example, Mayor Richard Daley, the Irish Mayor or Robert De Niro, the Italian. He is Robert De Niro, an American Actor. Harold Washington remains the first Black mayor of Chicago.

The capital "B" is about respect. The lower case b is about America’s divide and separatism and marginalizing and demeaning and disrespect and overlook.

These caricature creations are white produced; white perceptions that went on to be in the minstrel show where White men wore blackface to further the stereotype of comedy and ignorance that was buffoonery.

These stereotypes were popular as they were used to sell products like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben and the Cream of Wheat guy – and to have a people ignored and denied and mocked.

The truth had nothing to do with the formula; it is what people do to demoralize and demean a people. And then of course, if not the passive Negro, there was the Blackbuck and the Jezebel Black woman whose sexual prowess was projected as oversexed beings. Don't believe it, look above at the Vogue cover.

All of this to categorize the Black man as deficient not fully human, to enjoy intelligence and the ordinary functions to the luxury of life. All of this is what the small b translates.

When I first started N’DIGO, I was defining Black differently – as sophisticated, cosmopolitan, literate, cultural, jazzy, and sophisticated. Carefully, we wrote powerful words to describe those who graced our _Vogue like covers. We were changing the image, as we were consciously aware of a new narrative.

One cover story featured the late Reverend Johnnie Colemon. I received an irate call from a White woman to say that a Black woman could not be a " renaissance woman" as the caption read. I was taken back with the call. And I shared the conversation with Johnnie. She said, call her back and invite her to church.

I did and she accepted the invite. She met Rev. Colemon and wanted to know who built the church, meaning what foundation or large white religious group. She could not and did not believe Black money had built the church. She came back a couple of times in amazement and eventually apologized for what was her ignorance. She made a nice donation to the church and Colemon refused it telling her to go find some poor people that she could relate to. Johnnie's lesson to me was to kill with kindness.

On another occasion, I ventured to describe the N’DIGO reader to a White ad agency as I was pitching advertisement. The N’DIGO reader was cosmopolitan and metropolitan, I said. I was challenged and was told that Black people were not and could not be that. I was killing their stereotypical image.

This was most notable in White ad agencies with big budgets. I had one of the most insulting conversations with one of the top agencies, which told me that they had no stats on Black people eating corn flakes, Kellogs that is. They said there was no record of Black folk eating corn flakes and if their research didn’t show it, it didn’t exist.

I thought this was a joke. It wasn’t. I went beyond the account executives on the project to me demanding a meeting with the company president to discuss this incredible train of thought based on absolute ignorance that I found disgraceful.

I shared lifestyles info with the president and very seriously he asked if I would coordinate a tour of Black middle- to upper-middle-class household homes so that they could see for themselves what was in the kitchen cabinets. What kind of furniture was in their homes, from soap used to bathroom tissue to bedspreads, etc?

He actually wanted to take a busload of his account executives on a field trip to Black homes. He even provided a list of people, from a list of who's who for the tour. I told him how insulting this was, but he failed to see it. I cussed and left the powerhouse bigot.

Words are powerful; they describe and define. The Black press has always capitalized "N" and the "B" and it is past time for the White media to try to catch up and change its ugly ways that are born out of and nurtured in racism. And furthermore, its time for the White Press to improve coverage of Black folk and to hire Black journalists from Editor-In-Chief to interns.

And still, we rise. Hello.