It’s unlikely that many readers noticed, or cared, when news outlets started using % instead of percent after a numeral — a change prescribed by the Associate Press Stylebook last year.

Many newspaper readers have probably noticed a change made in the last month, however. AP, along with many news organizations, now recommends capitalizing Black in reference to people.

It’s a change long sought by activists and finally realized during nationwide protests against racial injustice. The change presumes that Black signifies an identity, not a skin color.

“AP’s style is now to capitalize Black in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense, conveying an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa,” John Daniszewski, AP’s vice president for standards, said in the announcement on Juneteenth. “The lowercase black is a color, not a person.”

The AP Stylebook is used by the majority of the nation’s newspapers. Major newspapers and news chains that have their own usage guides, including the Los Angeles Times and USA Today, also shifted to Black this month. Locally, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times made the change.

“[I]n light of recent and ongoing events and the evidence of a real shift in usage across many sources,” the Chicago Manual of Style followed the AP’s lead a few days later. The Chicago Manual is used in publishing offices, including the Northwestern University office from which I retired.

The New York Times and the Washington Post, arguably the country’s two most influential newspapers, are still debating whether to make the change. Their hesitation isn’t reactionary — they are known as liberal publications — but reflects the complexity of the issue. It was debated two years by AP journalists in consultation with outside groups and thinkers.

Opponents of the change expressed concern that it fails to recognize that people brought from Africa as slaves came from many diverse backgrounds.

Then there is the matter of what to do about white when you capitalize Black. Those who argue against capitalizing white say that it is a skin color, not an ethnic identity, and that white people do not share a culture or an experience such as slavery. Also, capitalization could seem supportive of the white supremacists who capitalize the w.

On the other side is the argument that capitalizing white would be a needed reminder of white privilege. “Whiteness is endowed with social meaning that allows people to move through the world in a way that people who are not white are not able to do,” University of Chicago sociologist Eve Ewing tweeted in calling for the capitalization of W.

The Chicago Manual of Style, “as a matter of editorial consistency,” is allowing the capitalization of “White and similar terms” when referring to racial and ethnic identity.

AP now recommends capitalizing Indigenous in reference to the original inhabitants of a place, and it will make a decision within a month about whether to capitalize white. Thousands of newspapers, magazines, and public relations offices that use its stylebook would follow its lead.

The National Association of Black Journalists has come out in favor of capitalizing all racial identifiers. The Chicago Sun-Times has announced that it is also capitalizing Brown when “the terms Black and Brown are used together to collectively describe a group.” The Sun-Times is continuing to lowercase white, however, because “cultural trends among white people . . . are much more disparate.”

Those of you who aren’t editors and writers might be surprised to learn that editorial style is about more than where to place a comma. Style guides are updated to reflect social change. For instance, women were referred to as Miss or Mrs. when I began my career, then Ms., and finally by their last name only, just like men. Later came the movement toward person-first language — for example, “people with disabilities” rather than “disabled people.” More recently, both AP and the Chicago Manual of Style decided it was acceptable to use the singular “they” to be sensitive to nonbinary people for whom neither he nor she is appropriate.

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ANTI-TRUMP COMMENTS: 120TH IN AN ONGOING SERIES

“They are grasping at straws to try and explain this away. We’re looking at people picking at the margins for explanations to deny that we are seeing a surge.”
— Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease researcher at the Columbia University School of Public Health, about Trump and the Republicans who point to fewer coronavirus deaths to suggest that the worst of the pandemic has passed