The college students called me out (attacked me?). They were in my seminar “Race, Poverty, and American Criminal Justice.” They said that my language was offensive (racist?). They referred to my use of “Blacks” as a noun, although they did not put it in that grammatical fashion. It was wrong to say something like “Blacks are incarcerated at a higher rate than whites” (Whites?). Instead, I should be saying “Black people” or “Black males” are imprisoned at a higher rate. Black as a noun was bad; Black as an adjective was acceptable.

I had not been aware that mine was offensive language. I was surprised because I know that words matter, as my family can attest. The spouse was born with one leg shorter than the other. As a kid, she was labeled “crippled,” a term she detested because it made her seem helpless and deformed, neither of which is true. In those bygone days, however, it was an acceptable word. (She reluctantly accepts “handicapped.”) Words and their impacts, however, change. Today, “crippled” would be avoided. (In the mid-nineteenth century, The Hospital of the New York Society for the Relief of the Ruptured and Crippled was founded. It is now New York City’s Hospital for Special Surgery. The NAACP would have a different name if formed today.)

“Queer” was pejorative when I was a young man.  “He is a queer” did not indicate a normal difference in sexuality, but, at best, an unexplainable oddity. It more often connoted that something was amiss or wrong or perhaps even dangerous. My trans son, however, now embraces the term as do others who have formed a welcoming community. Their use of “queer” proclaims that they do not hide who they are, that they are proud of themselves.

For these personal and other reasons, I thought I was attuned to offensive words and terms and their changing meanings. I was surprised, then, when the students contended otherwise. I wondered if the students were correct, and with minimal delving, I found they had support. The 2025 edition of the AP Stylebook, perhaps the most popular arbiter of usage, backed them up and told me not to use “Blacks” as a noun as I had. Instead I was to use it as an adjective as in, for example, Black men, or the Black community. This confused me. I had taught the same course in 2019. The enrollment was larger, and the students were outspoken and well-spoken, yet no one had called me out as the present students had. I saw that the author of the book I had assigned for the following week, published in 2012, had used the language that had been labeled offensive. I was confused.

I then did more research and found a bit of uncertainty. The Chicago Manual of Style, used extensively in academic publishing, did not mandate the AP usage but favored it. I researched further and learned that this now mandated or recommended usage started to emerge in the 2010s. It did not become the “official” standard until 2020 when, for the first time, the AP Style Book adopted it.

This recent emergence helped explain why I had not known it and my 2019 class had not insisted on it. It had not yet become a standard. My present class of twenty-year-olds are the first generation to grow up with it, but, of course, in the hubris of youth, they did not know that. But I will try to abide by their wishes. I do not wish to needlessly offend. Too often when people are offended by language, reasonable discourse disappears.