After I hit publish last night at midnight and I tried to sleep, I realized I should have addressed why I used “Black” and “white” - one is capitalized and one isn’t. It felt silly to do that in this kind of piece. It more or less proved I’m still afflicted with white guilt. I am, obviously.
But these are the rules now of language. If you break them, that becomes the subject of your piece — not just for readers here but for those outside of this space who have been trying to prove for years that I am a “white supremacist” and a racist. It’s easy for them to point to something like that and say, “see!”
I also knew it would be a topic of commentary and conversation, and realized too late that I should have added a line in there somewhere, like the echo of 2020 is still with me and with us in how we write our sentences. It seems very strange in retrospect.
I struggle with it, along with preferred pronouns, because, despite everything, I haven’t really changed. The party changed. I’m still someone who spent much of my life concerned about race and racism, ironically enough, not that I’d ever get any credit for that now.
All the same, I understand if it is too insufferable to tolerate, and you can find info on how to unsub on the main page.
I just posted about this. I won’t capitalize black like I won’t capitalize white when they describe race. They are adjectives that don’t derive from proper nouns. We do capitalize African and European because they do. I’ve received a manuscript back from an editor (who is great) but like Harvard Medical School, Chicago Style has adopted this purely political nonsense. White is not capitalized by their rules, and it reinforces the bigotry of it all.
Oh, Sasha. You are caught between a rock and a hard place. Once you know you will be called racist and hate-filled no matter what you do, you might as well do what you want. I give your readers more credit than thinking they will unsubscribe for this reason even as I wish you had written it differently.