It seems trivial at first, a change so negligible as to be barely worth mentioning. But the more I think about it, the more it symbolizes where America is going wrong.
The New York Times has announced that, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, it will be capitalizing the word “black.” “We believe this style best conveys elements of shared history and identity,” said Dean Baquet, the paper’s executive editor.
Obviously, a newspaper is free to employ whatever forms it pleases. Words change over time, and style guides ought to change with them. For example, in reporting its own new usage, the Times noted that it had had a similar debate in the 1920s over whether to capitalize “Negro” — a term that was then unexceptional but that now sounds jarring.
Steven Pinker, the linguist and philosopher, calls it the “euphemism treadmill” — a new descriptor comes into vogue, is tarnished by association, and is replaced in its turn. The turnover is especially fast when, as in the field of race relations, there is a status value in being an early adopter of new forms. Thus, for example, we have gone in fairly short order from “Spanish American” to “Hispanic” to “Latino” to (as a born Limeño, I wince at having to type this) “Latinx.”
Pinker points out that, as far as the literal meaning of the words is concerned, the change is often inconsequential. There is no intrinsic etymological reason why, for example, “African American” should be preferred to “Afro American,” or why “people of color” should be more acceptable than “colored people.” Novelty is the key thing.
It is tempting to see the capitalization of a single letter as the latest politically correct fad, another example of a change that is initially mocked but eventually normalized. That, though, misses the vastness of the implication.
Let me spell it out. The capitalization means that dark skin is being treated as an all-encompassing identity rather than as a physical characteristic. The notion that melanin levels should, like height or hair color, be just one more bodily attribute is being junked. Yet that notion was what the whole civil rights movement was meant to be about. It is the basis of a modern, pluralist society. It was the ideal on which the United States was founded — the ideal that eventually impelled Americans to make a reality of the promise in the founding documents and give every adult citizen equality before the law.
How quickly we have gone from wanting everyone to be treated the same to wanting everyone to be treated differently. Here is the paper of record, saying that all black people are defined by their pigmentation. They may be rich or poor, liberal or conservative, ordinary or outstanding. They may be from South Carolina or South Dakota or, come to that, South Sudan or South Africa. It doesn’t matter. They are all part of a single cultural continuum. In the words of the paper’s national editor, Marc Lacey, “It seems like such a minor change, black versus Black, but for many people the capitalization of that one letter is the difference between a color and a culture.”
Isn’t that the very definition of racism, though — at least as we traditionally understood the word? Doesn’t it ascribe group characteristics, real or imagined, to every individual member of that group?
It is telling that the Times is not doing this across the board. Baquet says that “brown,” as a racial categorization, applies to a wide range of cultures, which is true. Nor does he want the paper to capitalize “white,” again, quite correctly, as you would be hard-pressed to argue that white people in Brazil and Belarus form a single bloc or have much in common. Yet, the vast and varied black cultures that exist on every continent are denied the same courtesy.
Are we supposed to believe that physiognomy trumps language, nationality, and familiarity? I have no idea, as I write, whether you, the reader, are black or white. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you will have other affinities that are more immediate. Suppose you were a white American tourist in Lithuania. Would you really feel more in common with white Lithuanian immigration officers than with a black American tourist on your flight? By the same token, wouldn’t a black American tourist in, say, Uganda be considered primarily just an American?
The logic of the New York Times’s argument is that two American babies born on the same day might belong to different cultures. More than that, they might arrive with a set of preexisting grievances against each other based on quarrels between people who happened to look like them. No country can succeed on such a basis.
