Another “tempest in a teapot” erupted in my local newspaper recently: an angry Letter to the Editor complained about how their copy checkers standardize spelling races. Many style sheets, including that favored by the Kearney Hub, assert that “Black” should be capitalized when referring to race, a standard practice since at least the Black Power Movement of the 1960s. However, “white,” as a race, frequently isn’t.
My local newspaper’s letter questioned whether capitalizing one race, and not another, might represent according respect to one, or worse, bestowing disrespect upon another. A friend responded by pointing out that White people (I capitalize races, for reasons I’ll describe later) have distinct ethnic heritages, like Irish or Italian. Black people, as a legacy of American slavery, don’t. Therefore being White is categorically different from being Black.
I find this logic unsatisfactory, for one reason: it assumes most White Americans come from ethnically homogenous backgrounds and communities, and know their background. This just isn’t always true. Many White Americans, including me, have only a murky understanding of our heritage, or have heritage so muddled that we can’t claim anything clearly. Indeed, the concept of Whiteness exists specifically to erase ethnic or national ties.
This isn’t to say that Americans don’t have ethnic heritage. Back-East cities like New York and Boston are notorious for their checkerboard of ethnic neighborhoods, planted in the 19th Century when immigrants used old-country ties to smooth the process of expatriation. Garrison Keillor made Minnesota’s broadly Scandinavian culture famous. Nebraska, where I live, has a patchwork of German, Czech, and even Welsh communities.
By now, however, these terms mean little. As immigrant generations died off, and American-born children grew up speaking primarily English, many felt tenuous roots in their communities, and moved around frequently to pursue work and education. Many intermarried, creating a White American culture not bound to older heritage. Observance of a town’s ethnic background became mere civic niceness, like singing the National Anthem before a softball game.
Personally, I have no particular ethnicity. I’ve casually adopted Irish, because Green Linnet CDs helped me through a lonely period in the 1990s, but I have scanty evidence of any ethnicity, and what I know is irretrievably mixed. My grandmother told a story from her childhood, of a teacher instructing students to ask their parents about their ethnic background. “You tell them you’re American,” they responded, “that’s all that matters.”
So yes, White Americans have ethnicity, insofar as we’ve preserved it, but that’s ceremonial, without much substance. In practice, White Americans with Celtic, French, and Slovak surnames can intermingle freely, with little impediment, and the occasional repetition of “how do you pronounce that?” My German surname has never stopped me venturing freely into any American city, because I’m no ethnicity. I’m White.
White, like Black, refers not to any genetic or cultural absolute, but how people treat one another. Writers like Ian Haney López and David Roediger have written about the maneuvers which legislators, captains of industry, and public intellectuals have used, to give White a legally defensible quality it never had before. Whiteness doesn’t simply exist; it was consciously, painstakingly created throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries.
For years, I had no consistent orthography for writing “White.” Though capitalizing “Black” was standard English before I was born, “White” remains widely inconsistent. Earlier blog entries show me sometimes capitalizing “White,” sometimes not. I only started dependably capitalizing “White” after first reading Ibram Kendi in 2018. Only then did I realize the lengths taken to squeeze White Americans together—and squeeze Black Americans out.
Therefore I capitalize White, when describing race, because it doesn’t describe a color. American Whiteness, like American Blackness, isn’t value neutral; it describes a shared history of power relationships, civic struggle, and economics. Where Europeans have class consciousness, and define themselves according to wealth struggles, Americans have race consciousness. Whiteness is, for good or ill, a shared heritage.
And yes, I anticipate the rejoinder, that White American heritage is artificial. But all heritages are artificial. James C. Scott describes the feats which, say, Parisian engineers undertook to expunge regional identities and replace them with pan-French nationalism. Almost all ethnic heritages represent instruments of control, designed to standardize humans into a governable mass. That includes whatever ethnic heritage you hold.
Grammar, like race, doesn’t just objectively exist. Human beings create, and re-create, both constantly. Capitalizing words has more in common with etiquette than science. And spelling rules, like salad fork rules, change to suit the changing world around them.
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