‘Silent’ Objectors
In 2020, after George Floyd was killed by a policeman in Minneapolis, newspapers across the country, many of which traditionally used a lowercase “b,” changed their style guidelines to uppercase “Black” in reference to people.
“The lowercase ‘black’ is a color, not a person,” wrote John Daniszewski, vice president for standards at the Associated Press, in a blog post about the decision. (The Chronicle of Higher Education made the change about a week before the AP did.) The following month, The New York Times followed suit, after a monthlong internal discussion.
The moves brought praise and relief from the greater Black community and Black academics alike, some of whom had already been capitalizing the “B” on their own for years. For those who had been asking for the change, it felt like a small win.
But some scholars say there is a “silent” group of Black writers and academics who prefer to take more liberty with the choice to capitalize, whether that means capitalizing both “White” and “Black” in their work, or choosing to lowercase the “b.”
In May, Rafael Walker, an assistant professor of English at Baruch College of the City University of New York, pushed back on edits we’d made in his essay for The Chronicle Review.
Walker’s opinion piece, “Who Gets to Write About Whom?,” discusses whether it’s acceptable for people to talk or write about those outside of their demographic. Walker had left “black” lowercase on purpose, but when his story was sent back to him after an editor’s review, he wasn’t surprised to find uppercase “Black” when referring to people.
Editors at The Chronicle had decided to capitalize “Black,” but not “white,” in June 2020. We decided not to uppercase “white” because we didn’t want to echo what some white supremacists do. (The Times, whose style guide we use along with our own, chose not to capitalize “white” because “white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way ‘Black’ does, and also has long been capitalized by hate groups.”)
In the past when this happened to Walker, he took offense.
“When that first started happening, it felt really insulting,” he says. “Often it’s white editors who don’t study race, telling me how the word should be written.”
Now, however, he’s not shy about pushing back when an editor automatically makes that style change.
“In capitalizing one, you end up marking it as something that’s different from the other thing,” he says. “The implication there is that Black people are raced while white people are not.”
That nuance made sense for Walker’s piece, so we published it with his preferred lowercase “black.” Different contexts call for flexibility.
A Long Time Coming
The fight to capitalize “Black” when referring to people dates back centuries. W.E.B Du Bois, the Black sociologist and civil-rights activist, always intentionally capitalized “Negro.” In the 1920s, he started a letter-writing campaign asking publications to capitalize the “N.”
“The use of a small letter for the name of 12 million Americans and 200 million human beings,” he once wrote, is “a personal insult.”
In 2015, Lori L. Tharps, then an assistant professor at Temple University and a free-lance writer, wrote a book review for The Washington Post on The Sisters Are Alright, by Tamara W. Harris. The story is about Black women in America, and Tharps, a Black woman who often wrote about the Black community, chose to capitalize the “B” in her draft. But her editor, who was white, said he agreed with her choice, but it wasn’t the Post’s policy to capitalize the “b.” Despite advocating for her in meetings with copy editors, they couldn’t persuade them to keep the capital “b.”
“It felt great to have this editor try,” she says. “But clearly it wasn’t enough.”
This was after she had written an opinion piece in The New York Times about the topic.
“This is one of my greatest frustrations as a writer and Black woman living in the United States,” she wrote. “When speaking of a culture, ethnicity or group of people, the name should be capitalized. ‘Black’ with a capital ‘B’ refers to people of the African diaspora. Lowercase ‘black’ is simply a color.”
For her, capitalizing the letter is about recognition for the Black community and empowerment in her own identity. She’s never identified as African American because she doesn’t have a “direct connection to Africa.”
“But I have a connection to the people who are known as Black Americans, who have created their own unique culture,” she says. “Why would I be lowercase when no other ethnic group is lowercase?”
A Commitment to Flexibility
Not every organization may follow the same rules, but at least a few have offered flexibility. The American Medical Association, for example, has chosen to capitalize “Black” and “White” when referring to people. But the AMA Manual of Style, typically used by authors of academic research in the medical and health fields, offers some exceptions to the rule.
“We acknowledge that there may be instances in which a particular context may merit exception to this guidance,” a blog post says, “for example, in cases for which capitalization could be perceived as inflammatory or otherwise inappropriate.”
The American Psychological Association’s stylebook has a similar policy.
And when The Chicago Manual of Style, commonly used in humanities fields, announced it would capitalize the “B,” its editorial staff acknowledged that “individual preferences will vary and usage may depend on context.”
While many Black scholars choose to uppercase the “B,” there are plenty who don’t, says Walker, the CUNY professor.
Walker pointed to La Marr J. Bruce, a Black writer and associate professor at the University of Maryland at College Park, who does not to capitalize the “b.”
“I use lowercase ‘b’ because I want to emphasize an improper blackness: a blackness that is ever-unfurling rather than rigidly fixed,” Bruce wrote in his book, How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind.
Over time, Walker has noticed a change in editorial attitudes around the choice to capitalize “Black.”
“It’s moved from an automatic change that the editors just make to a conversation with the author,” Walker says. —Oyin Adedoyin
