“Black,” as in the capitalized identifier for the people, is everywhere. Is there not a strange air to its ubiquity? A feeling of religiosity? The writer publishing in the North American press can no longer be willful when deciding how she might like to dress the word. Many style guides, including the one used by this magazine, now capitalize the “B”: a person is Black; a culture is Black. This standard has even encroached on the genre of fiction, like a stop sign installed in the badlands. How does the satirist work around the imposition, constructing her nasty, sarcastic world of minstrelsy and sharp tongues? The race has been made proper.
“I believe that eight million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.” This was W. E. B. Du Bois, ministering to literate society at the turn of the twentieth century, about the word “negro.” In 1929, Du Bois, by then a star activist and editor, the ur-Black American intellectual, made the case again in a letter to Franklin Henry Hooper, his white editor at the Encyclopædia Britannica:
First of all, the word “Negro” which was capitalized in my manuscript and which is already capitalized in everything I write, has been changed to a small letter. I feel very strongly on this point. I regard the use of a small letter for the name of twelve million Americans and two hundred million human beings as a personal insult, and under no circumstances will I allow this article to be published unless the word “Negro” is capitalized in this article. Of course, elsewhere in the Encyclopedia you will follow your own rule.
The letter was part of a larger pressure campaign, supported by Du Bois’s contemporaries Alain Locke and W. A. Robinson, targeting the Britannica, the Times, and the other bulwarks of Western media. By 1930, the Times acquiesced. “It is not merely a typographical change, it is an act in recognition of racial respect for those who have been generations in the ‘lower case,’ ” the newspaper declared. A perfect echo of this dignity dogma appeared in the Times’ 2020 article “Why We’re Capitalizing Black.” An editor on the national desk is quoted as saying that “for many people the capitalization of that one letter is the difference between a color and a culture.” The Associated Press, in a piece announcing its adoption of the same rule, also riffed on the color-not-a-person argument, which rings to me, at its most elemental, as an erasure of the role that the Black Power and Black Pride movements played in the shaping of how the people address themselves. (“Negro” didn’t fall away as if a deciduous leaf; “Black” was agitated for.)