Kyle Massey is an assistant news editor. He has worked at The Times since 1999.
As protests raged after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., two articles in The Times on Aug. 16 referred to both Mr. Brown and the state police captain overseeing security in the case as “burly.” Both Mr. Brown and the captain, Ronald S. Johnson of the Missouri Highway Patrol, are black.
Readers wrote to say that “burly” has long been a racial stereotype; the word hasn’t appeared in this context in The Times since the readers’ notes.
So here is the tale of a troublesome word with a fraught history and how The Times came to reconsider its use. Burly means stout, heavy or muscular.
Alan Blinder, along with Tanzina Vega, Timothy Williams and Erik Eckholm, who wrote the two articles on Aug. 16 that referred to Captain Johnson and Mr. Brown as “burly,” apparently meant nothing more. The articles noted that both were black.
A reader named Joseph McBride pointed out that the word was often used as a racially loaded term in the Jim Crow South, and elsewhere, and conveyed the idea that big black men are especially fearsome and threatening.
“As far back as my childhood in the 1950s or early ’60s, I remember the Milwaukee Journal stylebook stating that the phrase ‘burly Negro’ was not to be used,” Mr. McBride wrote. “I asked my father, a Journal reporter, why that expression was singled out, and he explained that it was a racial stereotype.”
Several publications have had formal or informal strictures against using the phrase, but not all were codified in stylebooks. The Times’s stylebook is silent on the subject.
Greg Brock, a senior Times editor who oversees corrections and other reader concerns, forwarded Mr. McBride’s message to the news desk, which (among other things) speaks to questions of Times style, tone, fairness and quality control.
Mr. Brock offered his own take on the word. Calling on his upbringing in 1960s Mississippi, Mr. Brock, who is white, recalled the use of “the term ‘burly Negro’ (well, with a derivation of the N-word) and then ‘big burly black man.’ ”
He said he supposed that “burly” was just a descriptive word now, but he couldn’t put aside its coded baggage. “The phrase does have a very long history as a stereotypical label,” he wrote.
A quick Google search confirms a wide perception that the word is racially loaded, and several online sources linked the use of “burly” to the so-called “black beast stereotype.” The term was a staple in rhetoric surrounding lynchings.
Editors on the news desk noted that “burly” has many apt synonyms, and though no official proclamation was made, word went out to Times reporters and copy editors to find alternatives.
Yonette Joseph, a news desk editor who is black, said that the use of “burly” depends on context. “If the articles were describing the actor James Earl Jones or William (the Refrigerator) Perry, I’d see no problem with the word burly,” she wrote in an email. “But in matters of race, when the context is crime and other malfeasance, I’d flag that word.” The same would apply, she wrote, for “anything that describes a black man ‘shuffling’ into a room.”
On Sunday night, Marc Lacey, who runs the newsroom on weekends, read an early draft of a profile of Michael Brown when he circled a description: “tall and burly.”
The word didn’t make it into the paper.