This is a comment regarding the article:“Yonkers Launches New Initiative to Help Students Get Working Papers Faster” that appeared in the August 22, 2025 issue of “Yonkers Rising”.
Any effort to help teenagers get jobs faster is a great one! I applaud it and I’m assuming this resource is open to all teenagers of Yonkers.
My comment is regarding the article’s capitalization of “black” and “brown” as it relates to human beings. Colors are adjectives. Adjectives describe a noun. In this case, two groups of people. Adjectives in the English language are not customarily capitalized unless they are part of a name or title. (“The Blue Hen Café”; “The Yellow Rose of Texas”) But if an (any) editorial staff makes the decision to break with grammatical custom and capitalize colors in reference to people, then it would be wise to apply this in a uniform manner to all racial groups, including “White”.
Here’s why: By capitalizing only particular racial groups and lower-casing others, it appears to show greater respect to one group over another. This results in fueling the ire of the “crazies”. So if “black” and “brown” are capitalized and not “white”, (as currently seen in many publications) this gives easy “ammunition” to MAGAs and white-supremacists. Why would we want to do that?
Also, by uniformly using one case or the other, it gives a subtle nod to the equality of all people. Especially if the word “people” immediately follows the color adjective.(“brown people”, “white people”, etc.) That’s the word that needs the most emphasis!
Lastly, there are some racial groups for whom it could be considered offensive to be identified by their racial “color”. For instance: Is it courteous to refer to the original inhabitants of North America as “red people”? To Asian people as “yellow people”?
I understand that sometimes there is a need to specify particular racial groups for clarity’s sake. But let’s “give ammunition” to the goal of harmonious relations by referring to each one in a consistent manner.
Maybe we should break with grammatical rules and always capitalize the most important word: “People”!
Thank you,
Diane Serniak
Yonkers
