Should i capitalize white when referring to a race

We believe that it is important to call attention to White as a race as a way to understand and give voice to how Whiteness functions in our social and political institutions and our communities. The violence of capitalizing White in this context makes us grapple with the history of how Whiteness has functioned and thrived in the United States; acknowledging that, yes, White people have had power and still hold power in this country.

Establishing a rule, instead of leaving capitalization to the writer as a choice, emphasizes the critical importance and political permanence of these words as real, existing racial identities.

Skip to content Search Search. To expose this force is to subject it to challenge. The historian Nell Irvin Painter made this point eloquently this summer. Black Americans, she says, live with what W. Italian Americans, Irish Americans, etc. The same cannot be said for many Black Americans, whose ability to trace back their line ends where it was shattered by slavery.

The point about the lack of a shared, unifying identity among the vast range of people thought of as white is a good one. But there is an important cultural experience shared by most of us of lighter hue: The ability to move through life oblivious to our race and to the safety and status it generally confers. The lowercase black is a color, not a person. AP style will continue to lowercase the term white in racial, ethnic and cultural senses.

We also now capitalize Indigenous in reference to original inhabitants of a place. These decisions align with long-standing capitalization of distinct racial and ethnic identifiers such as Latino, Asian American and Native American.