WHY I'M NOT WRITING "Black"
and why I may start!
I’m often asked how I feel about capitalizing Black. (There, I just did it – for what I think is the first time!)
And the truth is, it’s fine with me. I have given my reasons on my language podcast Lexicon Valley (which, for those interested, moves here to Substack at booksmartstudios.org as of the next episode, dropping on Tuesday, July 20th), but there is only a partial overlap between the audience for that and the audience who follows me elsewhere. Thus I will revisit the topic here.
A small part of me has always sensed that black when referring to race might be capitalized. The racial concept of black is so far removed from the core meaning of the color that it qualifies as very much a proper noun, a concept in and of itself, of a kind that suggests being couched as a label.
And if we’re in for a renovation of the term we use for referring to black people – and given how such things go it was about time: Negro yielded to black in the late 1960s; African-American settled in 25 years later; since the mid-2010s I’ve been wondering what would be next – Black is a damned sight better to me than African-American ever was.
* * *
I never liked it, and have only ever used it when grace required it. Black has always been good enough for me. For one, since the 1990s so many actual Africans have emigrated to the U.S. that the term African-American is increasingly confusing. Is a descendant of slaves in America “African-American” in the same way as the child of parents who grew up in Ghana and speak Twi at home? And let’s not even get into that white Africans in South Africa sincerely feel themselves, when relocated here, to be “African-Americans,” as do people from Africa of South Asian descent.
And overall, the African connection feels too distant to me to justify an ethnic designation. Opinions will differ on this, but to me, black Americans are not remotely “African” in the sense that, say, the Sopranos were Italian-American. Without the languages, with only extreme refractions of the music (as jazz and rock) or food, with different tastes and even values, I find the “African” designation forced – especially considering that “Africa” is no one thing (note how vacuous and depersonalizing it sounds to call white people “European”).
When “African-American” settled in, a critical mass of black people felt differently. The idea was that calling attention to our “roots” in Africa lent a certain sense of legitimacy, indicating that slavery was not the root, the essence, of what black people are. But this always struck me as an oversimplification of black history, and perhaps even a symptom of internalized dismissal. My “roots” are with the black people of my ancestry who forged lives right here in America, racism and the rest be damned. We might even respect what our ancestors thought. Black people even a generation past slavery who had known slaves born in Africa did not tend to think of themselves as “African.” I’m pretty sure my great grandfather John Hamilton McWhorter II, of whom one photo survives, did not. My great aunt T.I., trotting in the 1980s up the steep staircase at the North Philadelphia train station in her nineties, was not “African” in any sense: she was an American black woman.
Certain voices these days may cringe at the idea that black people are fundamentally Americans, given that America’s history is supposedly but an extended crime spree against blackness. However, this take on American history is incurious and simplistic, and I am loathe to accuse of ignorance the millions of black people who have lived disinclined to dismiss their entire life’s experience in this way. To me, modern black Americans’ beginnings in Africa are like birds’ origins as Velociraptors. Sparrows and hawks and parrots therefore are Velociraptors? Neat idea, but ultimately, come on.
* * *
So, Black is better. But why not “White” in parallel? I would prefer it, in fact, if Black is here to stay. However, language, as the life it depicts and mediates, is messy, and “White” has been adopted by white nationalists as a label for whites committed to defending their race from the barbarity of other ones in a country that needs to be Made Great Again.
Of course, we could decide that more civilized whites could pretend the Nationalists don’t exist and use “White” anyway. However, one senses that today’s idea that one is soiled by even implied association with racists and racism will render this idea beyond consideration, at least for a while. One chooses one’s battles. So how about “Black people” and “white people,” despite the slight untidiness, for the time being?
* * *
The reader may detect a faint air of indifference on my part. They are not wrong. For example, I stuck up for “Black” several months ago now, and yet I must admit I have not started writing it myself.
Part of this is because I write a lot, it’s a comfort zone for me, and old habits die hard. But another part is that I am not sure that adding this dollop of dignity to the written version of the term will meaningfully affect how people think about black people.
The term “black” came with an insistent, vernacular pride. The term “African-American” overtly stressed heritage, continuity. The term “Black” is also about pride, one senses, but because it exists only in writing, it cannot get across with the pepper that “black” did. “Say it out loud, I’m Black and I’m proud” sounds the same as the old version.
In the end, calling for “Black” will, to a large extent, make non-black people toe a line, capitalizing that b with a look two parts concern, one part genuflection and a dollop of fear. Okay. But really, it’s less about what you say you are (“I merit a capital B!”) than what you show you can do. Tyler Perry is doing. Representative to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield is doing. Alison Stewart of Nation Public Radio’s All Of It is doing. They, to me, are capitalization.
However, “contrarian” though I supposedly am, I do not consider it my job to disapprove just for sport. “Contesting” everything is recreation, not engagement. As such, Black is a nice gesture and, if anything, harmless. Maybe I’ll start using it myself.
How had I never seen or heard that “White” was considered a white supremacist’s or paranoiac’s capitalization of superiority or defiance? I’ll take that as a complement. And instead stick to a simple but deeply sincere gesture of equality: either both are capitalized or neither is. I’d begun using "Black" more often (though not exclusively, typos and autocorrect and hurried composition often have their way) as a gesture of reasonableness, and of respect. But I’m not going to self-consciously bow to keeping one lower-case while capitalizing the other. Call it the stubbornly egalitarian ethos of the poor and working class Scots-Irish, as distant to me today as African-born enslaved Americans are to any black Americans alive today. We are all on the same level. No man or woman is born better or worse - titles from birth are an Old World affront and absurdity. Moreover, while my reading is happily free from the self-conscious usages of whatever pathetic number of white supremacist typers and scribblers are out there, I do now - constantly - see, by context and tone and accompanying rhetoric, an increasingly sanctimonious and heavy-handed use of "Black". Be sure to buy prints from this Black artist, begins one pandering email. Learn how these Black-owned businesses are paving the way, goes another. The memo has gone out. We’ve received the emails, reminder calls, and texts. Assistant Manager, Dom, a la Office Space, has stopped by our cube to jocularly punch us on the arm and inquire if we’ve received it yet. This is far beyond that reasonable gesture of goodwill and respect. It’s pandering, and either imposing or complying. And, yes, it’s essentializing! I like making up my own mind based on the best marriage of common sense and consistent principle. I don’t want to have to scramble to react against what I just read for the first time some dumbass white supremacists apparently do. And in this, too, I get a whiff of yet another manipulatively expansive troll and panicky overreaction - Hawaiian shirts; the “OK” sign. Yes, “White” capitalizes a skin color. But think of how innocently I had begun capitalizing both Black and White: as the very opposite sort of statement - as a gesture of equivalence and equality. “White” is a simple descriptor; it does not belong to white supremacists. There are, however uncomfortable it might make the left-leaning among us to admit, a not insignificant number of entirely serious black and now “Black” supremacists out there, with real personal and institutional power, who are (and in their case I do read and hear some of the rhetoric) giddy at forcing people, with impunity and by threat of smear and slander, to utter the latest jargon. Language is entirely about power relations to them. People, categorized by race, really must enter and remain in continual zero-sum conflict and really do belong in a new caste hierarchy of meaning and value, determined by them and with them at the top. I get the linguist’s basic insight that there are rules of grammar; ethnicities are one thing; simple descriptors by color are another. Am I going to now go out of my way to make sure “Latino” isn’t capitalized? What about “Asian”? Do I only do so when all of these descriptors are appearing together and being related within one context? I don’t want to look like an illiterate or like I am going out of my way to demean any ethnic group. But there is a symmetry to black and white. And I am not convinced that, as in the rationale the AP and others have used, “Black” means and comprehends a more unified global ethnic experience and identity. There is a seeming incoherence in continually being scolded that “whiteness” is an evil invention that binds and benefits a sprawling variety of countries and cultures, regions and ethnicities - and classes - and even pigments - into one consciousness and identity of ubiquitous, uniform, and monolithic privilege -and then, to simultaneously suggest that white does not mean any actual shared ethnic identity and experience. I suppose what they mean is that it shouldn’t. And to that I wholeheartedly agree. But again it’s the counterproductive contradiction of obsessively reifying and essentializing race as a supposedly necessary means to subvert or (someday?) get past it. In intersectional “social justice” context, it’s plain what’s going on: it’s not enough to elevate black; white has to be denigrated, too. I’m not playing that game. What’s good for one of us is what’s good for another. I am serious about not reifying and essentializing skin color or racial identity. We are equal and the same standards should apply. Others can do whatever they like, but either I’m capitalizing both or I’m capitalizing neither. Because it’s the almost immediately recent status quo default and because it implies a shared and universalist de-reifying humility, I’m not capitalizing either. [Deleted and reposted to correct typos and add a few words.]
I don't know how to tell you this but to say it; there is no White Nationalist Movement.
There is no Right Wing either, other than GOP voters...and that's over and done with, honest elections are behind us (the system cannot climb off that perch. It can't).
If you mean MAGA, that's over and was never that racist. The Jan 6 crowd was the last pathetic gasp, appears to have been controlled opposition and staged at least at the Capitol, and their concerns were largely de-industrialization, open borders and being openly deplored.
That isn't and wasn't racist, and it's over anyway.
There is no White Wing, there is no Right Wing.
As to White Nationalists that's the same 50 people LARP-ing each other off on Twitter for years, and at least 25 of them are Feds or CI's.
There is no more a Right Wing Militia than there are UFO's, in fact the evidence for the latter is greater. Please note that FBI and other agents sucking in gullible and often mentally challenged people into schemes controlled at the Top by their agents such as Stewart Rhodes of Oathkeepers does not count as a "Wing'.
I'm white, I'm rural, I'm a Vet, I'm so Right Wing I floss with barbed wire...and nothing of the phantoms mentioned [White Nationalist Armies , etc] exists. The KKK has been gone for decades.
There's no such boogeyman and hasn't been my entire life.
The closest thing in my lifetime are the 2d Amendment groups, but they're not racist and mainly interested in keeping their firearms (which they have)>
If anyone wants to go to war with the past - long dead - they can.
The boogeyman is as real as Hitler's Clone Army and as alive as the Confederacy.
However people have gone to war with the past before, especially if they want revenge in the present. It would be less grating if they admit to a motive of revenge.
The Race Conflict is Elite Whites vs Non-Elite Whites who had Romantic notions of the now fallen Republic and the Constitution. Both are gone, dead and buried.
I daresay others may even miss the Constitution and The Republic more than others...but at least they got Trump! And showed MAGA who's Boss !
The Bosses are White, but they have names like Pennyfeather or SchmooStein, not Bubba or Joe Bob. The entire drama the last few years has been crushing the peasant uprising, sure most of the common folk were white. Most of the country is white, despite what you may have heard.
But have away at the Windmills ! And the Statues !
Now mind you....something may happen.
In fact you may be nearly certain something will happen, but it will happen on the Elites and Governments terms ....yes, they surely want Civil uprising. They won't stop till they get it, and they always get what they want and have all their lives.
On a hopeful note they don't always get it the way they want it.