I’ve always thought it looked strange to see people referred to in print as Black or White rather than black or white. For example consider this sentence: “A black guy was walking down the street and he saw a bunch of white guys standing around.” That looks fine, whereas “A Black guy was walking down the street and he saw a bunch of White guys standing around”—that looks weird to me, as if the encounter was taking place in an Ethnic Studies seminar.
But maybe I’m wrong on this. Jay Livingston argues that black and white are colors whereas Black and White are races (or, as I would prefer to say, ethnic categories) and illustrates with this picture of a white person and a White person:
In conversation, I sometimes talk about pink people, brown people, and tan people, but that won’t work in a research paper.
P.S. I suspect Carp will argue that I’m being naive: meanings of words change across contexts and over time. To which I reply: Sure, but I still have to choose how to write these words!
How are Black and White (or black and white) “ethnic categories”? Italian, Chinese, Mexican, maybe even American are ethnic categories. Black and White are races or, if you prefer, “racialized categories” (if you want the ethnic studies version!).
Capped ethnic categories are definitely unnecessary, and risk raising that aspect of the person over and above everything else, e.g. in “a tall gay Black man” why on earth should his ethnicity be more prominent than his height or sexuality?
“Prominent” has nothing to do with it; we don’t capitalize things in order to make them prominent, except on the web where PEOPLE SOMETIMES DO IT FOR EMPHASIS. In conventional writing, italics or boldface are used to make something prominent.
Capitalization is used for names of things. The Green Party, a White Russian, the Orange Revolution, the Reds, the Republicans. In the context we’re discussing White and Black are names of races, they’re not descriptions: the “black” person you’re talking about might have a lower albedo than I do!
So, if Black and White were to be capitalized in this context, it would be because they are names of categories, not descriptions of people.
(You mean a higher albedo.)
But I’m not sure it’s as clear cut as that : the meaning of descriptive adjectives can change according to the nouns they qualify. So white wine is yellow, & black pudding is dark red (before you cook it). There’s no paradox about a black man’s having a higher albedo than a white man; any more than there is about a good man’s being less obedient than a good dog.
Proper nouns for ‘races’ seems divisive.
In the Marines we called everybody some shade of green. So a black and a white person would be “dark green Marine” and “light green Marine” respectively. See if you can use that your papers.
Black and White are names (of races), and although they are based on descriptions that’s not all they are. It would be technically correct to call the White House a white house, but if we imagine a prankster painting the White House blue (good luck with that), the news reports would say the White House has been painted blue. It would still be the White House. In fact, New College in Cambridge is not new.
Members of the Green Party are not green, an Orangeman is not actually orange. And so on.
If Black people really were black, and White people really were white, it wouldn’t actually matter. But we can have a light-skinned Black man…or, indeed, an albino. He’s white, but he’s Black.
So Black and White should definitely be capitalized when used to describe races.
That said, I agree with Andrew that it looks silly, and I don’t do it. I say they’re black people and white people. It doesn’t make sense, but hey, it’s language. We are the masters of our language, not the other way around (just ask Humpty Dumpty).
That said, I don’t capitalize black and white in this context and I agree that it looks silly to do so.
Humpty Dumpty was just a egg with something up his sleeve!
(Always liked that quote though.)
Agree with your points and remember getting real impatient with Umberto Eco’s lecture about how the colors refered to by colour lables where very different circa 100 BC.
The statue doesn’t seem to be a very useful example, and I don’t find Jay Livingston’s post very persuasive either. As far as the color of a person goes, no color label would be much more accurate than “white” since nearly every person is composed of such a wide range of clearly different colors, from one side of the hand to the other, and from the tip of the nose to beneath the chin (and across time as well – e.g. sunburn, weathered, wan, fevered, etc). And individual members of the same race offer an even larger range. Since no single color label would be “accurate”, is it really that relevant that white or black isn’t accurate?
As for the statue, the ability to differentiate between a person and a statue is built into the structure of (at least the English) language. From a very early age we’re able to identify the subject identified by a pronoun and recognize subjects with agency/intention from those without. I can’t imagine too many sentences/paragraphs where it wouldn’t be quickly clear whether one was talking about the statue or a person. We don’t need to capitalize a letter to distinguish between the two. And multi-use words are rather inevitable. Just as we use “long” to refer to distance and to time, it doesn’t seem like a problem to use white to refer to a color and to an ethnic category or race.
Well, Negro and Caucasian would both be capitalized, wouldn’t they?
European-American and African-American as well.
So, why not Black and White?
I stumbled across your blog while I was looking for some good discussion on stats and writing in social sciences.
I’m using uppercase D for Deaf and lower case h for hearing people in my writing. I do research on how Deaf people share ASL (American Sign Language) content online in form of video. Maybe I should use upper case H for Hearing people. The upper case D is used to indicate cultural identity shared by Deaf people who use a form of sign language. If I was writing about all Deaf people, I say Deaf, deaf, deafened, and hard of hearing people. I don’t use upper case for the other categories because its a category by physical condition of hearing status. I don’t use the word hearing impaired because that term is not used from a culture/sociology point of view in the Deaf community. Maybe I’m opening a can of worms but if one was to use the concept impaired to describe people, e.g dominant type as the norm, White then the others who are minorities would be White impaired. I find the use of words like Deaf to be more straight forward.
I think generally when describing people, it depends on the subcontext. Depends on who the paper is for, I add a sentence to describe the usage of upper case D to describe deaf people who are culturally identified as Deaf and use sign language. Describe what it means to be culturally identified if the paper is not for a Deaf knowledgeable audience. Maybe if you were writing about Black and White people for a paper that will be read over-seas in different countries, then do you put in i.e. use the upper case B to describe a specific group in North America? For me when I see upper case B and W for Black and White people, I always think it’s referring to sub context especially in the US of ethic and culture differences. Do people describe about usage of upper case for Black and White same as for other categories of people in papers? I don’t think I have seen except in some articles from 1970’s I read for my grad courses.