I haven’t always uppercased the ‘W’ in my own writing, but I do now
In recent days, multiple well-respected journalistic outlets have announced to much fanfare that, having reflected on the rapidly shifting American racial landscape, they will be capitalizing “Black” as designations for people and cultures.
“Black is an ethnic designation; white merely describes the skin color of people who can, usually without much difficulty, trace their ethnic origins back to a handful of European countries,” wrote Mike Laws in the Columbia Journalism Review on June 16, before the article was updated with revised language.
Meanwhile, Black people, from Tamir Rice to Darrien Hunt to John Crawford, and countless others whose names we may never know, have been murdered for holding, respectively, a toy gun, a fake sword used for cosplay, and a BB gun.
Perhaps the only thing more remarkable than the powers of this shield is its seeming invisibility, which permits White people to move through the world without ever considering the fact of their Whiteness.
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.
