This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

Fred Hiatt, the late editorial page editor of the Washington Post, wrote a compelling column before his untimely death.

It dealt with the idea that journalists – and others – should choose to capitalize the letter ‘B” in the word “Black.”

Here is how Hiatt started his column:

“How much controversy can there be in a capital letter?  Quite a bit, it turns out.  

“The social justice movement that gained force in the wake of George Floyd’s brutal killing under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer has spurred calls to start capitalizing the word ‘Black.’  Many news organizations have shifted their style.

But, Hiatt asked, if you capitalize “Black,” what about “white”?  A capital “W,” he said, can evoke the odious writings of white supremacists, so many people resist that change.

Hiatt continued that historian Nell Irvin Painter wrote that, “One way of re-making race is through spelling — using or not using capital letters.  A more potent way, of course, is through behavior.”

That’s right.

Changing behavior to avoid racism matters more than just capitalization.

But, as one admittedly small step in that, direction, I intend in the future to capitalize all words that describe a person’s ethnicity because ethnicity is important and a key part of who a person is.

Black.  White. Brown.  Etc.

So be it.