Style point: Have you ever met a 'white' person or a 'black' person?

I am developing the new syllabus for my fall journalism course at Rutgers and I will be re-enforcing the need for telling the truth in journalism. No longer will my students refer to a “black” person or a “white” person. They will have to use their creative vocabularies to come up with a different way to describe people when writing news stories.

I have never met a “black” person and I certainly have never met a “white” person. This truth has been a part of my teaching for eight-years, but beginning in the fall students will not write stories using those terms.

To make my point, I ask a “white” student if he or she has “black” friends. If they do, I promise I will give them $100 for an introduction. With the same promise I ask a “black” student if he or she has “white” friends. Every time the answers are enthusiastically affirmative to having “black” and “white” friends. They salivate looking forward to the cash as any college student would. You should see them preparing to text their friends on their cell phones.

I then approach the very same students holding a white piece of paper and say, so your friend is the color of this paper, yes? Holding a black object to another student I state, so your friend is the color of this black object, yes? At that point the students realize what the journalism community as a whole refuses to acknowledge and that is, there are not “black” and “white” people. The students understand that they mistakenly lied because they were lied to by society and the journalism world.

As they immediately recognize this, they also sadly realize they are not getting the $100.

“Plez ignor last txt. splain latr.”

Journalism is about telling the truth. Unfortunately when it comes to describing Americans, journalists steadfastly refuse to be truthful. It’s convenient to refer to someone as “black” or “white.” It’s inconvenient to take the time to be creative and describe people in other more truthful ways. Now, that is an inconvenient truth! For instance, I have met many African-Americans, Irish-Americans, Jamaican-Americans and Polish-Americans. None were “black” or “white.”

In acknowledging this truth journalists are forced to face the rather uncomfortable fact that “black” and “white” are terms created for social-economic reasons with little regard to the true identities of people.

It was just two-years ago that the Associated Press Stylebook finally caught up with the rest of the world in using the term African-American, but it still claims that there are people who are “black.” It reads that the “term ‘black’ is acceptable for a person of the ‘black’ race.” I think one of my students not only could teach the AP editors the truth about “black” and “white” people, but they could also explain to the so-called “the journalist’s bible” that there is not a “black” race or a “white” race for that matter. There is only one race. It’s called human. That’s a simple fact that any anthropologist would support. Again, it’s about telling the truth and mainstream media have their collective heads in the sand.

I do look forward to the day when the terms “black” and “white” are not used to describe Grenadian-Americans, Kenyan-Americans, British-Americans and French-Americans. More to the point, I look forward to the day when journalists will simply refer to subjects as Americans and only use the ethnicity description when needed for journalistic reasons.

By the way, the offer still stands. I will give $100 to anyone who introduces me to a “black” or “white” person. I am just aching to meet one.