The summer that shaped my later opinions
I lead Western Oregon Editors, a group of editors that meets twice a month. We have heated discussions over such important matters as commas, hyphens, and dashes—em dashes not en dashes, in case you wondered. When we discussed the question of whether we should capitalize white and black when referring to race, we could not reach agreement.
Because we are in an era of what I call consciousness raising about our language related to race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, and ability, punctuation pundits have different opinions about whether and where to capitalize white and black.
At first, the powers to be decided that Black should be capitalized but not white. The idea was that white is our society’s default and White people (caps intentional) don’t recognize a racial identity but do think in terms of ethnicities. You know, German American, Irish American. Someone pointed out that we shouldn’t capitalize White because of the pejorative use by White supremacists who capitalize White with the intention of emphasizing some sense of racial superiority.
The style guide for Associated Press, which governs punctuation for newspapers, sides with lowercase white and uppercase Black. The stated rationale is that White people have no shared experience of discrimination. I guess that implies no need to recognize a “race”? The Chicago Manual of Style, which is the go-to guide for books, and the APA style, for the American Psychological Association, and other guides, advise capitalizing White.
Is thinking of White as a default for our society not evidence of racism? One common assumption is that if you want to be a full-fledge American, you need to adopt White culture, which means assimilation. How else do we reach that “ideal” of a melting pot. I believe this has been a successful sales job, inherently racist. Although in recent years, we’ve witnessed more recognition of other races and ethnicities, everyone is expected to assimilate into the American way, which is a pureed White soup.
I admit that at first, use of capitalized White looked wrong. Now it feels like recognition of equality of Black people and White people. What do you think about use of white or White?
2 comments
Jeannie Seeley-Smith
I think your question about capitalization actually raises a fascinating question about racism. Your question makes me wonder if the capitalization debate exposes something deeper about racism itself. If Black is recognized as a racial identity but white remains lowercase because white is considered our cultural “default,” isn’t the idea of a default race precisely what we should be questioning?
I don’t believe equality requires pretending that Black and White Americans have shared the same history or experience. They haven’t. But grammatically treating one racial designation as an identity and the other as merely the background seems odd to me.
Maybe the real value of capitalizing White isn’t to elevate whiteness at all. Perhaps it does the opposite: it stops allowing white to hide behind the idea of being the unmarked “normal.” It identifies White as a racial category too, rather than leaving everyone else to be defined in relation to it.
For that reason, I think your conclusion makes sense. If we are going to use Black and White as racial classifications, I would capitalize both.
Elizabeth Lyon
I agree. It’s telling that there was ever a question over capitalizing White.