In my edits lately, I’ve been capitalizing the word “Black” when it refers to people’s race/ identity. Why?
Words are always in flux and never static, no matter how they’re codified—words are constantly flowing in and out the dictionary, and altering as people use them in different ways and recognize the weight behind them. Even the tiniest alteration—like a capitalization—can change the meaning or the impact of a word.
Last year, after George Floyd’s murder and the big protests that started in May/June, newspapers and style guides were making the change from using lower-case to capitalizing Black. The Chicago Manual of Style, the style guide for fiction novels, has since changed their practice to capitalizing Black as a “guideline” and respects the author’s choice to use either option.
Why not just use “African American” instead? Many Black people aren’t American, for one, and many also cannot trace their ancestry to a particular place because of slavery. Capitalizing the B in Black shows a respect for Black culture and traditions that have flourished out of and in spite of slavery as its own identity. And we already capitalize other identities, like Asian, Latinx, First Nations (here in Canada), or Native American.
(If you’re wondering: nope, we do not capitalize “white.” White culture isn’t a thing, and capitalizing white would center whiteness, which is already centered way too much.)
Capitalizing Black is just a drop in the bucket for how much work needs to be done to effect real change. But as people who work with words all the time, we know that words have power, that even just a letter being capitalized has power. So let’s start there, and also do the real work—protesting, voting, challenging white privilege and fragility, listening to and centering Black voices—that will help bring about systematic change.