Roll Over, Phil Collins — Today, Professor Nell Irvin Painter Takes On The Orthographic Dilemma Of The 21st Century's "True Colors"

Today's essay by a renowned scholar in African American history, Nell Irvin Painter, grapples with validity of capitalizing the color words for Caucasians (White v. white), African Americans (Black v. black) and muses briefly about Asian Americans (Yellow v. yellow?), Hispanic/Latino Americans (Brown v. brown?), and Native Americans (Red v. red?). Unfortunately, there is no clear path through the difficult terrain of racial color designations. In fact, this blogger grappled with the capitalization and color designation of African Americans in the early 1970s when the times were a-changin'. The first history dissertation accepted by Texas Technique University was entitled, "The Negro In Texas, 1876-1900" and that was followed by another dissertation in African American history — "Black Texans: A History, 1900-1930." As the writer of the third dissertation in African American history in Texas, this blogger attempted to avoid controversy with the opening paragraph of "A Survey Of The History Of The Black People Of Texas, 1930-1954." These three dissertations were the beginning of what two writers termed, "The Texas Tech School Of Black History" in The West Texas Historical Association Yearbook (2006), pp. 102-119. It would seem that the issue of color words and capitalization of those words has not come clear over the past 50 years. If this is a (fair & balanced) consideration of the American Dilemma, so be it.

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[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi

[x WaPo — DC Fishwrap]
Why "White" Should Be Capitalized, Too
By Nell Irvin Painter


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absence American apply Associated black brown capital category change compare considered culture different Ewing group historically identity ideology individual intellectual journalists letters linked Lives lowercase matter National nationalists others people power race racial recently reservation simply situate something State summed terms thinking Times took University unraced visible white years York

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Let’s talk about that lowercase “white.”

Restructuring policing in ways that matter will take years, and many more Confederate monuments remain standing than have come down. But in these past few earth-shaking months, one change has advanced with startling speed: All this social upheaval has suddenly and widely restored a capital B to the word “Black.”

I say “restored,” because that capital B appeared in the 1970s. I used it myself. Then editors, uncomfortable with both the odd combination of uppercase “Black” and lowercase “white,” and the unfamiliar, bumpy “Black and White,” took off both capital letters. “Black” returned to “black.”

In the wake of massive George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests, however, media outlets and journalist associations are re-embracing the capital B. The Associated Press, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and many others took the step. (The Post has said it is considering the change.) Even Fox News joined the crowd. The most common motive can be summed up as respect. To many, the case for capitalizing “Black” seemed obvious, whether as an ethnicity or a racial designation.

But what about “white”?

I had been inclined toward the new formula: capital B for “Black”; lowercase w for “white” and lowercase b for “brown” (another important question to resolve) — but with serious reservations.

My initial thinking: When I compare the cultural, intellectual and historical heft of the three categories, “Black” comes out well ahead of “white” and “brown.” We have whole libraries of books and articles about “Blackness,” world-beating traditions of music and literature, even entire academic departments 30 to 50 years old specializing in African American/black studies. Compared with blackness, whiteness and brownness are severely under-theorized.

But, in a June statement, the National Association of Black Journalists articulated a different view, stating, “NABJ also recommends that whenever a color is used to appropriately describe race then it should be capitalized, including White and Brown.” Such a recommendation from the leading organization representing black journalists should give anyone pause.

A second reservation arose as I considered the asymmetry of racial identities of blackness and whiteness — and how they function differently in American history and culture.

These two identities don’t simply mirror each other — one works through a pronounced group identity; the other more often is lived as unraced individuality. However much you might see yourself as an individual, if you’re black, you also have to contend with other people’s views. W.E.B. Du Bois summed this up as “twoness,” as seeing yourself as yourself but also knowing that other people see you as a black person. You don’t have to be a black nationalist to see yourself as black.

In contrast, until quite recently white Americans rarely saw themselves as raced — as white. Most of them, anyway. The people who have embraced “white” as a racial identity have been white nationalists, Ku Klux Klansmen and their ilk. Thanks to President Trump, white nationalists are more visible than ever in our public spaces.

But that group does not determine how most white people see themselves. Instead, in terms of racial identity, white Americans have had the choice of being something vague, something unraced and separate from race. A capitalized “White” challenges that freedom, by unmasking “Whiteness” as an American racial identity as historically important as “Blackness” — which it certainly is.

No longer should white people be allowed the comfort of this racial invisibility; they should have to see themselves as raced. Being racialized makes white people squirm, so let’s racialize them with that capital W.

Others have come to similar conclusions. In June, Kwame Anthony Appiah of New York University said capitalizing “White” along with “Black” would situate “White” within historically created racial identities that have linked the two terms over a very long run. For intellectual clarity, what applies to one should apply to the other.

More emphatically, Eve L. Ewing, a poet and sociologist of education at the University of Chicago, recently started capitalizing “White” to emphasize the presence of whiteness as a racial identity: “Whiteness, she says, is not only an absence.” She compares the fates of the McCloskeys, a white couple who pointed loaded firearms at protesters in St. Louis, with that of young Tamir Rice, who lost his life simply for playing with a toy gun in Cleveland. The capital W stresses “White” as a powerful racial category whose privileges should be embedded in its definition.

Ewing may have been thinking of James Baldwin, who said at Wayne State University in 1980, “white is a metaphor for power.” The capital letter can underscore the existence of an unjust racial power imbalance.

Capital-W “Whiteness” is less saliently linked to white nationalism than to racial neutrality or absence. We should capitalize “White” to situate “Whiteness” within the American ideology of race, within which “Black,” but not “White,” has been hypervisible as a group identity. Capitalizing all our races — “Black,” “Brown” and “White” — simply makes this ideology visible for all.

One way of remaking race is through spelling — using or not using capital letters. A more potent way, of course, is through behavior. ###

[Nell Irvin Painter is a US historian notable for her works on United States Southern history of the nineteenth century. She is retired from Princeton University as the Edwards Professor of American History Emerita. She has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and as president of the Southern Historical Association. Painter began her career at the University of Pennsylvania and moved on to history professorships at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and, finally, at Princeton University (NJ) as the Edwards Professor of American History until her retirement in 2005. She has written several books and that bibliography includes a New York Times best-seller, The History of White People (2010). See Painter's books here. She received a BA (anthropology) from the University of California at Berkeley and both an MA and PhD (history) from Harvard University (MA),]

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