Why I capitalize “White” and all other race words
In the English language, capitalizing a word tells us that the word possesses weight as a concept, particularly in regard to people. This is why most adjectives describing distinct group identities get capitalized—for example, ethnicities (Appalachian, Rohingya, Fulani), nationalities (Bolivian, Congolese, Danish), and religious traditions and denominations (Jewish, Protestant, Sikh, Sunni, Shinto, Zen, etc.).
Much of the time, we do this with race also, particularly where such a designation is linked to geographical origin, e.g. “Asian,” “Native American,” “African American,” “Latinx,” or “Caucasian.” But race is not a universally capitalized qualifier; in particular, any race terms referencing skin color (such as “white,” “brown,” “people of color,” and even “black”) are usually or often left lowercase. This inconsistency is a window into many of the problems with mainstream society’s present attitudes toward race.
Among the color-race terms, “Black” is the one most often capitalized. In the 1920s and 30s, W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP led successful campaigns to get “Negro” capitalized in the American press, which the Brookings Institute referenced recently in their decision to capitalize “Black” in print. Modern arguments for capitalizing “Black” also include the idea that Black is an ethnicity because North American African-descended people came from the common experience of being forcibly severed from their heritage — something not true for White people. But even acknowledging this, “Black” still is not universally capitalized as it should be. For even as “Black” is indeed an ethnicity, it still inexorably refers simultaneously to race. And in the realm of race, if you are going to capitalize “Black,” why not also capitalize “white” and the other color-race words? This discrepancy hangs unsettled, waiting for a resolution.
Arguments to capitalize ethnicity but not race have also shown up as a justification for not capitalizing “white,” lest one sound like a White supremacist. Luke Visconti wrote at DiversityInc in 2009:
I do not believe “white” needs to be capitalized because people in the white majority don’t think of themselves in that way. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this–it’s just how it is. The exception is white supremacists who have a definite vision for what “White” means — and they capitalize the W.
Until recently, I generally agreed with these arguments. Ethnicity and race certainly are distinct, if intersecting, identities. But something deeper bothers me about not capitalizing color-race: Why accord diminished importance to a concept that still has so much meaning and power?
The most obvious answer seems to be wishful thinking. Race is a painful subject, steeped in North America’s ugly history of genocide, slavery, and Jim Crow. Since most White people today identify as non-racist, why would we want to further validate the concept of race by dignifying our own racial classification with a capital W?
…the practice of capitalizing “Black” while leaving “white” lowercase sends an implicit message to White people that “race is a Black thing”…
As any anti-racist knows only too well, downplaying the reality of race does not make that reality disappear. Notions of race are still so strong in our minds that we cannot help but think through the lens of them. So many of the forms we fill out still have “race” boxes. Racial inequalities in everything from health to wealth persist. Physical descriptions of people’s appearances in law enforcement and elsewhere inevitably default to racial classifications, in place of more precise descriptions. Race classifications and fetishism in dating, pornography, and sex work are everywhere.
Racial bias and assumptions still abound, even if they’ve shifted in character. Besides, if there was ever any doubt about the insidious power of race, Donald Trump obliterated that doubt through his successful exploitation of racial angst to win the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Race is a Thing, with a capital T — just as entrenched in our worldview as ethnicity, nationality, and religion, if not more so. Writing about race without capitalizing color-race descriptors only fuels our pernicious ignorance of the titanic influence of color-race on our lives.
Moreover, the practice of capitalizing “Black” while leaving “white” lowercase sends an implicit message to White people that “race is a Black thing” — some special qualifier that applies to “those people over there,” and not to us. That attitude must change.
In considering the capitalization of “White,” Black blogger Lori L. Tharps of My American Melting Pot had this to say in 2014:
Some like to argue that if we capitalize the “b” in Black [then] we have to do the same for the “w” in White, when referring to White Americans. I have no problem with that. White Americans deserve their capital letter too, but I’m not here to fight their battles, mainly because most White Americans haven’t spent the last 400 years trying to disassociate their cultural heritage from models of inferiority and endemic pathologies.
Tharps is right. For most of North American history, large majorities of White people have clung to models of inferiority and endemic pathologies (of others). But even as the echoes of such bigoted beliefs still ring strong throughout society, today’s [historically new] White reticence to claim race also points to a hunger among many White people to get away from these insidious beliefs. But just as one does not put out a fire by running away and pretending the fire doesn’t exist, so we too must not run for cover behind evasive platitudes like “I don’t see color,” or “my race is the human race” when dealing with racial tensions.
Our societies must develop sufficient race consciousness for us to be able to stand strong in engaging and fighting racism as we would stand strong in engaging and fighting a fire; capitalizing all race words, including White, can help us and future generations to develop that race consciousness more fully. This means that “Brown” and the C in “people of Color” get capitalized too, in racial contexts. And while “indigenous” is not technically a color-word, it often serves to implicitly distinguish precolonial populations as “not White.” In such cases, the term “Indigenous” does play a color-raced role, and therefore should also be capitalized when synonymous, for example, with Australia’s always-capitalized “Aboriginal”; Canada’s always-capitalized “First Nations”; and the always-capitalized United States terms “American Indian” and Native American,” among other uses (The word “indigenous” in the purely descriptive sense of “produced, growing, living, or occurring natively or naturally in a particular region or environment” remains lowercase).
All color-race experiences have important, socially significant meaning, whether White, Black, Brown, Indigenous, or otherwise of Color — the same as the ethnic-race experiences that we capitalize without second thought. Let’s make sure our written language reflects that principle.
