Many people these days, noting my frequent skepticism of the woke vocabulary and woke prescriptions for language use, ask me why I’m capitalizing “Black” when I write about Black Americans.
The truth is: I’m not. The New York Times’s house style, on the news side and the Opinion side, requires it, and that’s how it reads when this newsletter publishes. But the copy that I send in has “black” styled with an old-school lowercase “b.”
I am not against the capitalized version that became the standard a couple of years ago at several of the major national news outlets. I get the idea that the capital letter can signal a separation from possible negative lexical associations with the color black — think of the dictionary scene in Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X,” wherein a series of words, “blackmail, blackball, blackguard,” are read aloud to an enlightened Malcolm Little, played by Denzel Washington. And I’m not oblivious to the impetus for this change that followed the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests over police violence. As Dean Baquet, The Times’s executive editor, and Philip Corbett, the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, wrote in a June 2020 memo to Times staff, summarizing the rationale for capitalizing “Black,” those protests “prompted discussions about many aspects of our coverage” and, after a review, “We believe this style best conveys elements of shared history and identity, and reflects our goal to be respectful of all the people and communities we cover.”
Fair enough. But in the grand scheme of things — with which I try to be concerned — I have a hard time caring that much whether we write “black” or “Black.”
I know that terminology can matter. For instance, given the deep stain that slavery left on our society, I am in favor of nudging consciousness a bit by replacing the term “slave” with “enslaved person.” One can sense an attitude here and there, after all, a notion that slavery is inherent to some people, and it’s not a new one — Aristotle argued, “For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjugation.” I understand why we now refer to Ukraine as “Ukraine” and have abandoned the old quirk of calling it “the Ukraine,” which implies that it is merely a region, a locale — and specifically one subsumed by Russia — rather than the separate historical, linguistic, political and cultural entity that it is (a distinction that has had its relevance grimly demonstrated in recent days).
I have also never much liked the term “African American,” because of its implication that Black Americans are African in a way relevant to our current lives. To stress that connection in what we call ourselves always struck me as forced. Although opinions will differ on such things, in my view, the connection to Africa, for most of us, is too many generations removed for “African American” to truly work.
But the capitalization issue is about style and usage, rather than replacing one word with another, and the written rather than the spoken word. And it seems to me that people can process the written word “black” as having many meanings, just as they do when it’s spoken, when, of course, no capitalization is possible.
In writing as well as speech, we effortlessly process that to “pick up” refers to lifting objects, fetching children from school, getting a disease and increasing in speed. We can even handle words able to refer to nearly opposite things: a “fast learner” versus a chair “stuck fast” to the floor. Or the literal and figurative use of “literally,” which so exasperates many but does not create actual confusion. No one thinks someone who announces that they’re “literally boiling to death” on a hot day is melting away like Looney Tunes’ Abominable Snowman.
With the “black” issue, my ultimate sentiment is that we spend an inordinate amount of time concerning ourselves with how matters of power and diversity are expressed. I suspect that activists and agitators of yore would find our obsession with such things rather peculiar and worry that it siphoned off energy from more grounded efforts.
To be sure, aspects of how we express ourselves can affect thought. Many languages mark all nouns with a gender such that, for example, “table” might be feminine. In some cases, researchers who study the impact of language on how people think have found that someone who speaks a language in which table is feminine is more likely, if asked how a table would talk if it could, to imagine it speaking with a woman’s voice than an English speaker is. What English speakers refer to as “last month” can be roughly translated in Mandarin as the month above and “next month” as the month below. Researchers have found that Mandarin speakers, given a choice of two vertically arranged buttons, responded faster than English speakers in terms of choosing which button to press when the “earlier” prompt was associated with the top button.
This is neat stuff, and catnip for us linguists, but the effects are minimal and subtle. The gender effect turns up in the artificial context of the experiment, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it shapes how people live life, make judgments or create art. Mandarin speakers hit the vertical buttons faster than English speakers, but both English and Mandarin speakers responded faster when the “earlier” prompt was on the left with buttons arranged horizontally. Writing in both Mandarin (more frequently, at least, nowadays) and English is arranged from left to right.
So: It’s fine with me that others embrace the capitalization of “Black.” Maybe I will someday. But when I think of social change, my mind lingers more on, say, the Year Up program, which offers underresourced high school graduates an all-tuition-paid job training program directing them to positions in finance, I.T. and other fields while also assisting them with progress toward a college degree. Over the past two decades, it has expanded to cities around the country and helped thousands. It seeks, as the organization itself describes it, to bridge the “opportunity divide” for “young adults — no matter their background, income or ZIP code.” I think it’s a glorious thing and I want it to continue to grow.
Compared to this type of practical problem-solving, “black” or “Black” just isn’t as interesting.
Have feedback? Send a note to McWhorter-newsletter@nytimes.com.
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He hosts the podcast “Lexicon Valley” and is the author, most recently, of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”
