Identifying persons by race or ethnicity in newspapers

[Joel S. Berson]

The (early)18th-century American newspapers also added the "racial"
or ethnic identity of a person -- unless the subject was white and
"English".  There weren't many Asians in the news then; aside from
"Negro", the identification most often present was "Irish".

The 18th-century newspapers invariably capitalized "Negro", but that
may have been simply because it was the custom to capitalize all
nouns.  It would be interesting to see when the capital was removed,
and compare that with other nouns for "races", etc.

Joel

At 1/18/2010 01:03 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>I do recall that NYC papers up to about 1963-64 (after the Civil Rights
>March) routinely identified black criminal suspects and crime victims as
>"Negro" and perhaps "colored" (hazy here). The practice ended
>suddenly, often with an editorial statement explaining that the paper had
>never thought of it as offensive, but was now persuaded otherwise. The "N"
>of "Negro" had been capitalized in print for a generation: ISTR that in _The
>American Language_ Mencken (evidently a condescending
>paternalist) implicitly scoffed at the idea that any change was needed.
>
>I believe the NYC papers would also identify the ethnicity of Asian
>Americans in similar circumstances as "Chinese," "Japanese," "Korean,"
>etc. If so, that endedt too, unless the ethnicity was clearly germane to
>the events reported.

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