I have, for some time, mostly consistently used a capital B to begin ‘black’ when it refers to a racialized and demographic grouping. I have done this for a few reasons: to show respect, confer social power, and reduce or eliminate ambiguity. I have not been capitalizing ‘white’ for two reasons: because I associate that usage style with White supremacists and White nationalists, and because White people as a group don’t need any more empowerment. I have not capitalized ‘brown’ because I have not seen that usage style used more than a handful of times, and those only in academic contexts. Today, my mind has been changed, and I will be changing the style guide (such as it is) for Damnwalr.us going forward to capitalize all racialized groupings.

Here are the arguments which have persuaded me. Maybe they will persuade you, too.

First, the National Association of Black Journalists style guide recommends that ‘black’ be capitalized when referring to people, and suggests doing so for other racial and demographic groupings. Although the style guide does not offer an explanation for this choice, perhaps its recommendation is enough to be persuasive, given its particular relevance on the question.

Second, Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah says in The Atlantic (non-paywall link):

Conventions of capitalization can help signal that races aren’t natural categories, to be discovered in the world, but products of social forces. Giving black a big B could signal that it’s not a generic term for some feature of humanity but a name for a particular human-made entity. To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, one is not born, but rather becomes, black—and the same goes for all of our social identities.

[Emphasis added]
Appiah goes on to say

Luke Visconti, the chairman of the nonprofit DiversityInc and the author of an online column titled “Ask the White Guy,” has offered another perspective: In his opinion, capitalizing black but not white makes sense, because, while black people describe themselves as black, ‘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.’ […] What about Visconti’s argument that white people don’t think of themselves as white people? If he were right—and he isn’t—we could still ask: Should it be that way?

I’m not sure what leads Appiah to say that Visconti is not right about White people not identifying as such. When I was in college, I was part of a group of students who ran a project regarding student identity and what aspects people tended to use to construct their primary identity; that is, the ones which they volunteered to describe themselves rather than selecting from sets of options when asked (secondary identity). What we found was that students tended to build their primary identities around those ways in which they differed from the cultural defaults or the majority: they were more likely to mention being BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, or other people of color) than White, female or genderqueer than male, LGBTQ+ than hetero, Jewish or Wiccan or other religions than Christian, older returning students than typical college age, international than American, and so on. Not one respondent of the hundreds asked volunteered that they were White, though that was true of more than half of the participants as selected from the options for racial identity.

Based on that research and my personal experience, I believe that White people mostly identify as such either when asked (secondary identity) or when they were in a setting that reminded them of their whiteness, because they were in a minority in that setting or because they were engaging in some activity to which racialized group was somehow relevant. I can’t even tell you the number of times I’ve seen White people on social media actually object to being referred to as “White people”, sometimes going so far as to claim that labeling them as such was “racist”, rarely, if ever, recognizing the irony of the claim. Whiteness is just as constructed as Blackness and at least as relevant to point out, often more so.

Since the beginning of the nation, white Americans have suffered from a deep inner uncertainty as to who they really are. One of the ways that has been used to simplify the answer has been to seize upon the presence of black Americans and use them as a marker, a symbol of limits, a metaphor for the “outsider.”

Ralph Ellison, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks” 1971

Also from Appiah’s piece in The Atlantic, I learned that The Seattle Times updated its style guide as follows:

Black (adj.): Belonging to people who are part of the African diaspora. Capitalize Black because it is a reflection of shared cultures and experiences (foods, languages, music, religious traditions, etc.) …

white (adj.): Belonging to people with light-colored skin, especially those of European descent. Unlike Black, it is lowercase, as its use is a physical description of people whose backgrounds may spring from many different cultures.

Those descriptions reflect common misunderstandings among American White liberals regarding racialized groupings. The African diaspora covers a wide variety of cultures, no less varied than the collective cultures of people of European descent. Black people are grouped as such because of the invention of racialized groupings based on the combination of skin color and ancestral region, as are White people, not because they are a monolith. As Appiah says,

The main experience that African Americans share is being treated as African American. That experience arises from this identity, not vice versa, because without the concept of black, you can’t be treated as black. Once we do have the notion of black people as an identity group, we can freely talk about cultural practices and experiences common among its members. But we can’t start with the culture and experiences and derive the identity.

Finally, it is that denial of whiteness and its equal validity to blackness as social constructs of racialized groupings as illustrated by Visconti and The Seattle Times which are most persuasive to me that White should be capitalized. If we are ever to get to social and cultural parity, or the post-racial society many White Americans thought we were in at the turn of the century, White people must recognize their whiteness and how that affects perspective and culture and informs policy. Part of that is reminding them/us of their/our Whiteness, and capitalizing the word draws the eye and attention.

White privilege has enabled generations to see themselves as merely “American”, with “American culture” (if they recognize its existence, which many still do not), speaking “American English” (rendering AAVE and other American English as “dialects” and less valid), supporting “American” cultural expectations regarding behavior, presentation, and speech (among other things), and accepting the cultural framing of White small town Midwesterners (the “Heartland of America”) as the most American of Americans. All of that is based on whiteness and White American culture and renders those outside of it as “other” and as “less American”. In most cases, White privilege prevents those involved in reinforcing those constructs from seeing either that they’re doing it or that harm results to the people who are othered by their actions.

I found that Eve Ewing, of the University of Chicago, has similar reasoning for her recent switch to capitalizing White.

When we ignore the specificity and significance of Whiteness — the things that it is, the things that it does — we contribute to its seeming neutrality and thereby grant it power to maintain its invisibility. […] As long as White people do not ever have to interrogate what Whiteness is, where it comes from, how it operates, or what it does, they can maintain the fiction that race is other people’s problem, that they are mere observers in a centuries-long stage play in which they have, in fact, been the producers, directors, and central actors.”

So, White people, welcome to having your whiteness rendered more visible by those of us persuaded one way or another to capitalize your/our racialized grouping. I’m sure some will object, and that’s fine. Feel free to comment either way, just stay within the guidelines of the Damnwalr.us comment policy if you want people to be able to read your comment.