Why We Capitalize “White” When Writing About Race

Writing, in general, is an act of being deliberate and careful with one's words. We make choices with every single sentence we write. And this also comes down to the styles that publications use. Everything down to capitalization is part of the choice we make. ⁠

In the wake of the 2020 racial justice uprisings, many publications adjusted their style guides accordingly. One step many have taken (if they hadn't already) was to capitalize the word "Black" when referring to someone's race which previously wasn't widely capitalized when other races or ethnicities were such as "Asian" or "Latine/x." ⁠

For some publications, they have kept "white" as a race lowercase because it refers to the color of one’s skin rather than an ethnic group. Another reason that I’ve come across–and that I used as a reason when helping write a publication’s style guide–is to de-emphasize Whiteness given that it’s already assumed to be the default race.

However, through reading more and having discussions with others doing the work of antiracism, I’ve changed my approach. Which is why, at Doerr&Co., we've decided to capitalize White when writing about race. 

A variety of folks have pointed me to this Medium 2020 article by Eve L. Ewing, a Black writer and scholar studying and race about why she now capitalizes “White.” This article and Ewing’s work were largely the catalyst for the change in my own writing (at least when I have control of the style guide–note: how the article is published elsewhere depends on that pub’s style guide not the author’s internal style guide).

“Whiteness is not only an absence. It’s not a hole in the map of America’s racial landscape. Rather, it is a specific social category that confers identifiable and measurable social benefits,” Ewing writes. 

Whiteness is a racial identity, but it is often not considered as such, even by most White people. Ewing calls it a shield that permits some kind of invisibility that “permits White people to move through the world without ever considering the fact of their Whiteness,” she writes. “This is an incredible feat, through which White people get to be only normal, neutral, or without any race at all, while the rest of us are saddled with this unpleasant business of being racialized.”

White people don’t have to make the mental calculations about our race as we move about the world. When every person of color moves about the world, they have to make mental calculations about their own actions that ensure their safety. White people do not. However, because we aren’t constantly thinking about our race, we are completely unaware of how our actions rooted in our Whiteness are harmful to people of color.

“In maintaining the pretense of its invisibility, Whiteness maintains the pretense of its inevitability, and its innocence,” Ewing writes. It allows Write people writ large (particularly who perceive themselves as the “good” White person) to distance themselves from the dangerous White supremacists who kill Black people going about their day in a grocery store. It allows us to distance ourselves from the White supremacists crying about the “great replacement” theory. It allows us not to lump ourselves with the White supremacists who plotted a coup. By thinking of Whiteness as anything other than a racial group allows us to keep from reckoning with the fact that even our small-scale complicity in upholding a racist system is not tied to those other more overtly heinous aspects of White supremacy.

Ewing writes: “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.”

While the act of capitalizing the word “White” on a business blog may be small, and somewhat symbolic, it still has its part in the overall movement to undo White supremacy. White people reckoning with our Whiteness is an important part of subverting a racist system and it starts with seeing ourselves as White and grappling with what that means in the first place. 

Here are some resources for anyone interested in fully understanding Whiteness with a capital “W”:

• Read Eve L. Ewing’s full article here because she does an even better job at explaining the importance of this style choice.

• White Awake is an organization that offers trainings and resources that help White people connect more with their Whiteness as a way to combat White supremacy.