In the nearly 20 years I’ve taught at San Francisco State University, I’ve worked with an astoundingly diverse and inspiring mix of people. My students have come from nearly every continent (except Antarctica), socioeconomic group, religion, race, ethnic group and political persuasion. I’ve taught people from across the gender/sexuality spectrum. Students have shared their experiences with mental illness and drug addiction, and immigrants have revealed intimate details about their journeys to the United States and their efforts to stay in this country.

Each of these people has shaped me in some way, opening my eyes to new perspectives and my heart to different realities. I feel profoundly blessed to have known them all.

Many of the concepts and terms in this book have come from analyzing journalism with this diverse group of people. My students and colleagues have pointed out stereotypical depictions in the news that I hadn’t recognized and taught me terms I wasn’t familiar with.

The seed for this book was planted more than 20 years ago when the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism at San Francisco State University issued the original Diversity Style Guide, a collection of terms from half a dozen style guides that existed at the time. The guide was never published – it was just available in PDF form – and about five years ago I got the idea to update and expand it into a searchable website (https://www.diversitystyleguide.com/) and this book.

No one person can determine the correct usage of a word; this guide takes wisdom and advice from leaders in the field who have researched and considered the cultural, political, and linguistic meanings of words. Most of the glossary terms were taken, with permission, from these organizations and their style or media reference guides and I gratefully acknowledge them:

• Asian American Journalists Association and its Handbook to Covering Asian America
• Densho Encyclopedia
• Gender Spectrum
• GLAAD and the GLAAD Media Reference Guide, 10th Edition
• Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma and its guide, Mindset: Reporting on Mental Health
• Duncan McCue and his Reporting in Indigenous Communities guide
• Michigan State University School of Journalism cultural competence series:
  • – 100 Questions & Answers About African Americans
  • – 100 Questions & Answers About Americans
  • – 100 Questions & Answers About Arab Americans
  • – 100 Questions & Answers About East Asian Cultures
  • – 100 Questions & Answers About Indian Americans
  • – 100 Questions & Answers About Hispanics & Latinos
  • – 100 Questions & Answers About Muslim Americans
  • – 100 Questions, 500 Nations (co‐sponsored by the Native American Journalists Association)
• National Association of Black Journalists and the NABJ Style Guide
• National Association of Hispanic Journalists
• National Center on Disability and Journalism and its Disability Language Style Guide
• National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and the NLGJA Stylebook Supplement on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Terminology
• Media Takes: On Aging, a publication of the International Longevity Center USA at the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center and Aging Services of California
• National Institute on Drug Abuse Media Guide
• Native American Journalists Association and its reporting guides and advisories
• Neutrois.com
• Religion Newswriters Association and its Religion Stylebook
• TEAM Up (Tools for Entertainment and Media), a project of the Entertainment Industries Council, and the TEAM Up Reporting on Mental Health Style Guide
• Washington State Coalition for Mental Health Reporting and its Mental Health Reporting website.

I’m deeply grateful to the wise journalists and journalism educators who contributed chapters to this book – Venise Wagner and Sally Lehrman, Sandra Combs, Cristina Azocar, Joe Grimm and Osama Siblani, and Kristin Gilger. Joe also helped me think through some of the challenges of drawing guidance from sometimes conflicting sources and I appreciate our conversations and email correspondence over the past few years. I’d also like to thank some of the early readers – Donna Tam, Nashelly Chavez and Laura Castañeda.

Many journalists, journalism educators, researchers and media professionals took time to talk with me. I can’t list them all here, but I’d particularly like to thank Nushin Arbabzadah, Gustavo Arellano, Tyrone Beason, Darren Brown, Mary Chao, Aly Colón, Suki Dardarian, Gary Gates, Linda Jue, Marc Lacey, Karen Magnuson, Faiza Mahamud, Adam Maksl, Frances Negron‐Muntaner, Brenda Payton, Ray Suarez, Hollis Towns and Keith Woods. And I feel so lucky that Dori Maynard took time for an interview shortly before she died.

A huge thanks to my student research assistants – Danielle Parenteau‐Decker, Cecilia Abate, Arash Malekzadeh and Chantel Carnes – and to two talented graphic artists, Eva Rodriguez, who created the infographics, and Harlan Frost, who designed the logo and icons for the website. I’m grateful for grants from the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation and the San Francisco State University College of Liberal and Creative Arts that provided funding for me to hire them and for Kevin Cox, who helped administer the grants.

I’m also thankful for the team at Wiley – Elizabeth Swayze for believing in the project and to Haze Humbert, Vimali Joseph, and Janani Govindankutty for ushering it through the editing and production process.

Finally, I want to recognize the countless journalists who strive to report accurately and fairly about our diverse society. Throughout the process of researching and writing this book, I have looked to them for inspiration and insight.

Dr. Cristina Azocar is the chair of the Journalism Department and an associate professor of journalism at San Francisco State University. Prior to becoming chair she directed the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism. Azocar is an editor of American Indian Issues for the Media Diversity Forum and is a past president of the Native American Journalists Association. She is a member of the Upper Mattaponi Tribe of the Powhatan Nation.

Sandra L. Combs is an associate professor at Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, where she teaches a class on Race, Gender & Media and a variety of journalism and media writing classes. She also is adviser for the A‐State student newspaper, The Herald. Before moving to Arkansas, she taught journalism classes at Wayne State University (Detroit) and Michigan State University (East Lansing). Prior to teaching, she worked for about 22 years as a full‐time journalist with The Fort Myers News‐Press (Florida), The Oakland Press (Pontiac, Michigan), and The Detroit News. Now she also works as a freelance journalist and communications specialist.

Kristin Gilger is director of the National Center on Disability and Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. She is also associate dean in charge of professional programs for the Cronkite School and serves as executive director of the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism.

Joe Grimm is visiting editor in residence at the Michigan State University School of Journalism. He was an editor at the Detroit Free Press for more than 25 years and, in the 1990s, published 100 Questions and Answers About Arab Americans. That led to a series of related cultural competence guides cited elsewhere in this book.

Rachele Kanigel is a professor of journalism at San Francisco State University, where she teaches writing, reporting, editing and media entrepreneurship courses and advises the student newspaper, Golden Gate Xpress. She was a daily newspaper reporter for 15 years and has freelanced for TIME, U.S. News and World Report, San Francisco Magazine, MediaShift, Health and other publications. She has led study‐abroad programs in Italy, France and Israel with the Institute for Education in International Media and was named a Fulbright Specialist. She is the author of The Student Newspaper Survival Guide.

Sally Lehrman is the director of journalism ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. She has long been involved in evangelizing journalism values and ethics as a local and national leader in the Society of Professional Journalists and the SDX Foundation, among other activities. She is the author of News in a New America, an analysis of the diversity of American news coverage and newsrooms, published in 2006 by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and co‐author (with Venise Wagner) of Reporting Inequality: Tools and Methods for Covering Race and Ethnicity, a book that provides journalists and journalism students with tools and reporting strategies to improve coverage of structural inequities that lead to racial disparities.

Osama Siblani is founder and publisher of The Arab American News in Dearborn, Michigan. Founded in 1984, it is the oldest continually published English/Arabic newspaper in the United States. Siblani came to the United States in 1975 during Lebanon’s civil war and became an engineer. He started the newspaper to create a news source and a voice for the Arab‐American community.

Venise Wagner is a professor of journalism at San Francisco State University. She was a reporter for several California dailies, including the Imperial Valley Press, The Modesto Bee, The Orange County Register, the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle, covering border issues, religion and ethics, schools and education, urban issues, and issues in the Bay Area’s various Black communities. She is also co‐author (with Sally Lehrman) of Reporting Inequality: Tools and Methods for Covering Race and Ethnicity, a book that provides journalists and journalism students with tools and reporting strategies to improve coverage of structural inequities that lead to racial disparities.

In the four years I’ve spent researching and writing this book, the reactions to my project have fallen into two general categories: “That sounds really interesting; we need a guide like that” and, “Oh, so you’re writing a book about how to be politically correct.”

It was easy to feel encouraged by the first response, but it’s actually the second one that has spurred me on. Friends, family members and colleagues would laugh or wink when saying “politically correct,” knowing the term itself has become pejorative and may imply an excessive adherence to liberal dogma. But their snide use of the phrase gave me a mission: to educate people about the potency of language, the way it can empower people and the way it can disenfranchise them.

Like it or not, language is political, particularly when we talk about sensitive issues like race, gender, sexuality and disability. Words are laden with connotations, double meanings, innuendo – baggage we may not completely understand unless we’ve lived those words. You’ll never really know what it feels like to hear and internalize the words colored, Negro, African American, Afro‐American, Black (not to mention the dreaded n‐word) unless you are Black and you have been called those things.

All media professionals have to face decisions about the language they use whenever they set out to write about the human experience. Is it better to call the son of a Guatemalan immigrant Hispanic or Latino? Should you refer to a member of the Passamaquoddy tribe in Maine as an American Indian or a Native American, an Indigenous American or a Native person – or avoid racial descriptors altogether and just name her tribal affiliation? Is a man in his 80s elderly, a senior citizen or just a senior?

It may seem like these are questions simply of what’s in vogue, but often they’re a matter of accuracy. Some may say media outlets are pandering if they change their style guidelines in response to complaints from activists. But often media professionals struggle to keep up with the evolution of language so that they can report truthfully, thoroughly and accurately about diverse groups of people.

When discussing this with people, I sometimes offer the case of my older brother. He generally goes by Robert or Rob. My father used to call him Roberto from time to time and his wife affectionately calls him Robbie. He’ll answer to any of those names. But refer to him as Bob and he’ll immediately correct you. Say “Bob” again, and he’ll bristle. To call him Bob is simply wrong. It’s not his name. And that’s sometimes the way it is with terms related to diversity.

As the writer and editor of this text, I don’t pretend to have all the answers. But the contributors and I have put together a guide that we hope will raise the consciousness of journalists who strive to be accurate. In researching this book, we’ve read studies, news reports and style guides and interviewed dozens of journalists and experts with the aim of offering the best, most up‐to‐date advice on writing about underrepresented and often misrepresented groups.

It’s not easy to navigate these issues. Sometimes just having a simple conversation can feel like walking through a minefield. And even when we’re armed with the “right” language, we can find ourselves using terms that offend. For years, I’ve been in circles where people skirted the term “minorities,” instead using “people of color.” The phrase, once a little awkward for me, now slips off my tongue easily. But when I interviewed Marc Lacey, national editor of The New York Times, he confided he doesn’t like that term.

“‘People of color’ is too close, in my mind, to ‘colored people,’ just a small grammatical shift away from a term tainted by the ugliness of segregation,” Lacey said in a Times piece entitled “What Racial Terms Make You Cringe?” “I know it’s now commonplace, and that it’s used with the noblest of intent. But White is a color too so everyone is technically of color, right?”

This guide attempts to help journalists, journalism students and other media writers prepare for those sometimes awkward conversations. We’ll explore the subtle and not‐so‐subtle ways that words can alienate a source or infuriate a reader, how a thoughtless pun in a headline can elicit hundreds of angry letters or ignite a firestorm on social media. It also aims to give writers an understanding that diversity in journalism is first and foremost about accuracy, about representing an individual or a community or an issue fully and completely, about not leaving people out and about telling the whole truth.

In the 21st century, some have said we live in a post‐racial world, a society where America can elect a Black president, a place where race doesn’t matter. But the racial tensions that exploded in 2014 and continued in subsequent years with a series of documented killings of young Black and Brown men by police, have once again shone a light on issues related to race and inequality. Newsrooms that had played down racial divisions in their communities were forced to confront them as angry protests erupted in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri; Chicago; New York City; Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; Seattle; Minneapolis; and other cities. Editors assigned reporters to go out into their communities to delve into tensions that had been simmering just below the surface for decades. The divisive presidential election of 2016 and the national discord that ensued after the election of Donald Trump forced journalists to delve into identity, immigration, multiculturalism and other “diversity” issues even more as culture wars broke out in the streets and on college campuses around the nation.

Diversity is not just about race. As Robert C. Maynard, the first Black publisher of a major metropolitan newspaper, noted, class, geography, age and gender also create diversity – and divisions. Today, some people add sexuality, physical ability/disability and religion to this list of “fault lines” through which we all see the world.

It’s virtually impossible to be a media professional today and not have opportunities to explore diversity on a daily basis. Whether you’re a TV reporter in a top‐10 market, a social media editor for a website or a general assignment reporter for a small‐town daily newspaper, you’re bound to encounter people whose experience of the world is far different from your own. But as Sally Lehrman and Venise Wagner point out in Chapter 2 “Implicit Bias – Addressing the Bias Within Us,” it’s easy to ignore some people and to downplay some perspectives. Reporters frequently interview the easy‐to‐reach contacts already in their cell phones rather than strangers they have to seek out. Journalists may think to call Arab Americans to get reaction to a war in the Middle East or an act of terrorism, but do they seek them out when writing a story about Medicare or tax reform? Black people are prominently featured in stories about crime, sports, poverty and racial discord but how often do you see them quoted in Mother’s Day features or technology stories?

This book is about going past the usual sources and representing the patchwork quilts of the communities we cover. It’s also about facing our own prejudices and biases, of climbing out of our comfortable cocoons. I know it’s easy to think we don’t have bias. We’re good people. We decry racism. Many of us want to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted,” as they old saying goes. But we – all of us – also grew up with certain blinders that narrow our perspective and keep us from seeing the whole story. This bias may crop up when you notice men hanging out in front of a graffiti‐covered liquor store in the middle of the day and you clutch your expensive camera a little closer. It may arise when you’re doing person‐on‐the‐street interviews in a neighborhood of immigrants and you avoid approaching Asian people for fear they may not speak English. Or it may come up when you’re interviewing a person who identifies as non‐binary and you struggle to use the right pronoun.

Question your own assumptions. Seek out the people you don’t identify with, people who don’t remind you of your grandmother or cousin.

This guide is not the last word but rather a jumping‐off place. After reading The Diversity Style Guide, start talking about these issues with your classmates, colleagues, supervisors and friends. If we’ve done our job, this book will spark further discussion, debate, even argument, in classrooms and newsrooms around the country. These issues aren’t easy to talk about. Emotions may run high. Remember that each of us comes out of a unique human experience, shaped by parents, teachers, neighbors, friends and enemies, as well as by the media.

Consider the role you play in perpetuating and busting stereotypes. Think carefully about the words you use. Whether you’re a reporter for a college newspaper or the editor of The New York Times, you can make a difference.

A Note about Capitalization

You’ll notice that races in this book are capitalized. There has been much discussion about whether the first letter in Black and White (and Brown) should be capitalized. Most journalism style guides, including those produced by the Associated Press and The New York Times, put both White and Black in all lowercase letters. Essence and Ebony magazines, The Chicago Defender and many other publications serving African‐American communities capitalize Black (but only some of them capitalize White). Some say Black should be capitalized the way Asian and Hispanic are, while others note the latter trace their origins to proper names, which are always capitalized. Black and White don’t.

When I looked to other experts for guidance, the advice was contradictory. The National Association of Black Journalists does not capitalize Black in its publications, including the NABJ Style Guide. But the team that put together 100 Questions & Answers About African Americans, after much debate, decided to put a capital letter on Black. Many of the terms related to Black and African‐American people in The Diversity Style Guide come from these two guides. For the sake of consistency, I had to make a judgment call. After much research and consideration, I elected to capitalize Black and White (and the less‐used Brown) when used in a racial context.

It was a tough decision, one that literally kept me up at night. But I chose to capitalize races because that capital letter offers a modicum of respect, a recognition that these are not just colors but ethnicities like Asian American, Jewish and Greek. I was also moved by the passionate testimonials of people who argue for capitalization:

For me, in the era of Black Lives Matter, capital‐B Black is an act of defiance against a society that often paints minorities as secondary. That inferiority nags at me when I’m called a racial slur; when I’m forced onto the road because a group of white kids see me and won’t share the sidewalk; when a security guard follows me around a store. Trying to explain to your (often) white editor that Black is so closely tied to your own lived experience can be complicated and emotional. I’ve heard “I just don’t get it” too many times. But when the profession meant to expose systemic issues doesn’t “get it,” that becomes yet another barrier.

—Eternity Martis, “A Capital Idea: Reflections on the politics of capitalization,” Ryerson Review of Journalism

If ‘African American’ is inadequate, then we cannot settle for a lowercased “black.” To validate the need for capitalization, we need to prove the uniqueness of the culture of Black people in America, and the most painful part of this journey is acknowledging that for long stretches of American life, Black people were not even legally considered people.

—Barrett Holmes Pittner “The Discussion on Capitalizing the ‘B’ in ‘Black’ Continues,” The Huffington Post

This is about identity and respect. With a mere slash of a copyeditor’s pen, Black culture is reduced to a color. It seems silly to have to spell it out, that black with a lower case “b” is a color, whereas Black with a capital “B” refers to a group of people whose ancestors were born in Africa, were brought to the United States against their will, spilled their blood, sweat and tears to build this nation into a world power and along the way managed to create glorious works of art, passionate music, scientific discoveries, a marvelous cuisine, and untold literary masterpieces. When a copyeditor deletes the capital “B,” they are in effect deleting the history and contributions of a people.

—Change.org petition sent to the Associated Press and The New York Times

While many of those who champion the capitalization of Black don’t capitalize White, I advocate consistency. So Black, White (and Brown, which is occasionally used in this book) are capitalized in The Diversity Style Guide. The only exceptions are direct quotations from texts in which the words are not capitalized.

If you write for a publication, I encourage you to check your organization’s style guide – and, if the spirit moves you, to challenge it. Even if your editors don’t change the guidelines, you’re bound to have an interesting discussion that may prompt others in the newsroom to think about race in a new way.