by Jonathan Krall
When writing on this website, we have adopted the convention, similar to that of the Washington Post, of capitalizing Black and White whenever we refer to these significant cultural groups. I am occasionally asked why we do this. Today, the idea of capitalizing Black is not as controversial as when W. E. B. Du Bois advocated for Negro instead of negro in the 1920s. In a nation where anti-Black racism is visible daily, the capital B is an elevation. Because Whiteness needs no further elevating, many hesitate to apply the capital W. In his excellent book, How We Win The Civil War, author Steve Phillips says “I am no longer capitalizing ‘white’ because white nationalism has become so powerful…” However, in the Atlantic, Kwame Anthony Appiah quotes two (Black) staffers from the Center for the Study of Social Policy: “To not name ‘White’ as a race … frames Whiteness as both neutral and the standard.” Here, in Virginia, where “white” became a term of law as early as 1705, we can move beyond the “white” default. We can embrace multiculturalism. We can envision a world where race is known only as the archaic social construct that produced those elements of White culture and Black culture that we continue to enjoy.
Embracing knowledge
In November, 2019, I attended an Undoing Racism workshop hosted by OAR and conducted by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. I was taught that it is racist to assume that White is a neutral default, such as in a story where only non-White characters are described in racial terms. Arguing for the capital W and against the idea that white is somehow a neutral default, Appiah states that, “Perhaps a stronger argument would be that white people don’t deserve a lowercase w and shouldn’t be allowed to claim it.”
As an example, the above-mentioned Atlantic article includes the following definitions, taken from The Seattle Times style guide:
- 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.
We do not feel that the latter definition above is accurate. In the above-mentioned Atlantic essay, Appiah points out that “The style guide of the American Psychological Association declares, as it has for a generation: ‘Racial and ethnic groups are designated by proper nouns and are capitalized. Therefore, use ‘Black’ and ‘White’ instead of ‘black’ and ‘white.’” In other words, we capitalize Black and White because they are, effectively, ethnicities, like Salvadoran or Tigrayan.
Are we elevating White nationalism?
As noted above, some fear elevation of White nationalism. “At the Columbia Journalism Review, we capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms. For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.”
We believe that ignoring White nationalism is a specific tactic, not a grand strategy. Yes, we avoid repeating their toxic rhetoric. However, we must also never pretend that they have gone away. Our own work shows that they have not.
Embracing Freedom
While White nationalists likely believe that White people invented freedom, American history intertwines Black and White from 1619, through the 1676 shared struggle of Bacon’s Rebellion, to Crispus Attucks, the first fatality of the 1776 American Revolution, and onward. Black America’s commitment to American ideals of freedom and democracy is, arguably, second to none.
When we work to achieve freedom, we envision doing it together. In the concluding paragraph of The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin writes, “Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we–and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others–do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”
Embracing multiculturalism
Can we move forward together, celebrating multiple ethnicities, including Black and White, within a shared multicultural nation? Working across racial lines is more than a nice idea. According to Steve Phillips, positive electoral victories are being realized by centering the concerns of communities of color. That is, “inspiring and mobilizing voters of color and progressive whites” to effectively vote for change. In the chapter of his book that he devotes to the work of New Virginia Majority) , he notes that “Nearly half of all Virginians under the age of eighteen are people of color.” By wielding a high “level of cultural competence and expertise,” he tells us, we can develop a “new, vibrant, multiracial ecosystem of electoral activity.”
Honoring cultural and linguistic differences between Black and White can have significant positive effects. For example, in the 1990s, teachers found that they could better teach English to Black children by first teaching themselves to correctly translate between Black English (then called Ebonics) and American English. Sadly, this proved controversial, and the program was shut down.
Returning to The Fire Next Time, Baldwin similarly embraces multiculturalism: “White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being. And I repeat: The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks–the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.”
Baldwin envisions total liberation, for all ethnicities, in terms of love. “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”