William S. Lear wrote: >I have one final question. I'm not very consistent in my treatment of >the words "black", "blacks", "white", "whites", etc. when referring to >black persons, black "culture" (I still don't know what this is exactly), >etc. Is it the accepted practice to capitalize these words? For some reason, it's popular in PC copyediting circles to capitalize Black but not white. I've never understood the reason for this. I asked editors at two now-defunct publications, the Guardian and CrossRoads, why they did this, and neither could explain it. And another style issue: why is African American generally not hyphenated but Italian-American is? Doug PS: LBO house style is to capitalize neither and hyphenate both.
