So what does this have to do with racism? Think how regularly the issue of race enters the discussion of cultural or political issues. The identity politics of the Left is the most obvious. But race permeates most of the media, as well. Race is embedded in issues that seemingly have nothing to do with skin shade, such as hunger and auto insurance rates. I provided a couple of examples here.
But there is a more insidious tactic than concrete issues emerging in recent years. That’s what this post will focus on. That tactic is to capitalize skin color as an immutable identifying factor of individuals. For example, black American becomes Black American, or white person becomes White person. I see no other purpose other than the insidious purpose of getting people to automatically include skin race as relevant in judging and identifying a person.
This amounts to a psycho-epistemological attack on individualism, and of reason. It is an attack on the philosophical heart of the Enlightenment and thus on Americanism. It supplants individualism with collectivism, and as Ayn Rand has observed, racism is “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism”—and, as Rand observed, “the simplest collective to join, . . . the easiest one to identify, the least demanding form of ‘belonging’ and of ‘togetherness’ is: race.” So if you want to destroy individualism, and elevate collectivism—as the modern Left wants to do—what better place to start is there but to elevate racism.
Many major news organizations have adopted the racist tactic of capitalizing skin color, some capitalizing “black” and some capitalizing “black” and “white” and even “brown,” in their writing style guides. Let’s check out a couple of articles defending this racist psychological invasion of our language. Italics will be my emphasis unless otherwise noted.
Kwame Anthony Appiah argues in The Atlantic, The Case for Capitalizing the B in Black, that
Black and white are both historically created racial identities—and whatever rule applies to one should apply to the other.
True. There is only one race of humans, universally identified by the characteristics of reason and free will—the “rational animal.” Rationality spans across all skin colors. So why not simply eliminate these arbitrary “historically created racial identities,” rather than institutionalize racism in our language, and identify every person as part of the human race? Of what value are racial identities other than for nefarious purposes?
Should the b in black, as a designation for people of African descent, be uppercase? Media outlets and other institutions are asking themselves that question these days, and many are answering in the affirmative. But the reasons given for why can sometimes be perplexing—in a way that reveals larger perplexities about the meaning of race.
Everyone knows that black people aren’t literally black. Plenty of white Americans are darker in complexion—look at your olive-skinned friends of Mediterranean or Armenian extraction—than plenty of black Americans. If Kim Kardashian, the media personality and entrepreneur, counts as white while Maulana Karenga, the radical activist and creator of Kwanzaa, counts as black, it isn’t because he’s darker than she is. So the color term is a poor metonym for the group in question.
But if we already have “African” to identify people of African descent, what purpose is served by substituting skin color for a continent?
And there’s plainly a rationale for capitalizing black in order to head off ambiguity (what am I referring to when I refer to “black hair”?). For many advocates of the uppercase, though, the stakes are far greater. “Black with a capital ‘B’ refers to a group of people whose ancestors were born in Africa, were brought to the United States against their will, spilled their blood, sweat and tears to build this nation into a world power and along the way managed to create glorious works of art, passionate music, scientific discoveries, a marvelous cuisine, and untold literary masterpieces,” Lori L. Tharps, who teaches journalism at Temple University, wrote in 2015. “When a copyeditor deletes the capital ‘B,’ they are in effect deleting the history and contributions of my people.” Or as Anne Price, the president of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, put it last year: “capitalizing Black is about claiming power.”
So America is to be singled out for the horror of slavery, despite the fact that slavery had been a worldwide institution for thousands of years, and that America inherited this particular form of slavery, African slavery, from England. Plenty of people were forcibly relocated against their will. White Southern Europeans, especially Italians, were forcibly taken to North Africa as slaves. What person of even minimal self-esteem would want to be identified by ancestral slaves?
But it gets worse. The racists sneak in the hideous premise that African slavery, rather than Capitalist freedom, “built this nation”; which means, slavery is a positive good! Well, the Confederate slavocracy’s leading defender of plantation slavery, George Fitzhugh, made the same argument in his Sociology for the South: Or the Failure of Free Society. Why would anyone align with Fitzhugh and the slave-holding American South? Because both fitzhugh and modern racists share a common hatred, Capitalism, which is integral to American principles.
When W. E. B. Du Bois campaigned, back in the 1920s, for Negro, rather than negro, he remarked, mordantly: “Eight million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.” According to the diversity committee of USA Today, which decided last week to capitalize the B-word, the change reflected “understanding and respect.”
They already have one—American. Or, if one prefers, African-American. Once again, why substitute “Black” for African or American? Is there a more noble identity than American? Indeed, what person of even minimal self-esteem would want to be identified by his skin color?
So what about white folks? . . . The style guide of the American Psychological Association declares, as it has for a generation: “Racial and ethnic groups are designated by proper nouns and are capitalized. Therefore, use ‘Black’ and ‘White’ instead of ‘black’ and ‘white.’” That seems sensible enough. But for some people, White is the sticking point.
If you consider the capital letter to be a conferral of dignity, you may balk at the symmetry. “We strongly believe that leaving white in lowercase represents a righting of a long-standing wrong and a demand for dignity and racial equity,” Price, of the Insight Center, wrote. Until the wrongs against black people have been righted, she continued, “we cannot embrace equal treatment in our language.” The capital letter, in her view, amounts to cultural capital—a benefit that white people should be awarded only after white supremacy has been rolled back.
In other words, tribal revenge. Well, I can tell you, I find it revolting and demeaning to have my skin color elevated to an identifying factor. There is nothing dignified in capitalizing my skin color. And when will white supremacy be rolled back? And how? The answer is simple: when Capitalism and individualism have been abolished, and replaced with . . . what? Collectivism and its political manifestation, statism, most likely totalitarian socialism. That’s the real motive behind the whole movement to capitalize skin color, given that racism is the most obvious form of collectivism.
This line begs a crucial question. What, exactly, is the “long-standing wrong?” Racism, that’s what. Why, then, institutionalize racism in the language? Apparently, unlike the Abolitionists of the 19th Century or the Civil Rights crusaders of the 20th Century, these 21st Century activists are out to save racism, rather than eradicate it.
Finally, in explaining Why ‘White’ should be capitalized, too, Nell Irvin Painter explains for the Washington Post:
[I]n terms of racial identity, white Americans have had the choice of being something vague, something unraced and separate from race. A capitalized “White” challenges that freedom, by unmasking “Whiteness” as an American racial identity as historically important as “Blackness” — which it certainly is.
No longer should white people be allowed the comfort of this racial invisibility; they should have to see themselves as raced. Being racialized makes white people squirm, so let’s racialize them with that capital W.
This is pure, hateful tribal revenge. It erases the individual, assuming that all white people deserve to “squirm.” It is also incredibly juvenile. How about embracing individualism so no one has to “see themselves as raced?” Your damn right it makes me squirm, but not in the way Painter means it. It is offensive and racist, and it angers me—as it should any person of integrity and self-esteem regardless of skin color. Skin color has nothing to do with character, which is self-made. Isn’t racial invisibility the goal we should promote? Not according to primitives like Nell Irvin Painter.
While Painter's goal is to promote racial identity, others claim that capitalizing black isn’t about race at all, but about culture. As NJ.com, parent of the New Jersey Star-Ledger and other NJ news outlets, explains:
We are making this change to NJ Advance Media’s style guide to acknowledge and respect the word represents a people with shared cultures and experiences, and not a color. Black, we believe, should be used like other identifiers, such as “Asian,” “Latino” or “African American.” We also will continue to use “African American” in stories when warranted, as “African American” and “Black” aren’t always interchangeable.
So, which is it? Culture of race?
I could go on and on, because every justification for capitalizing skin color that I’ve read is just more of the convoluted rationalizing nonsense. The rationalizations are endless, but can’t change the fact that capitalizing skin color promotes racism—is, in fact, racism. But I’ll stop here. I’ve made my point. None of this is to say that race as determined by skin color doesn’t matter anymore. Though America has experienced significant progress in racial relations in recent decades, and today there is less racism in America than ever, bigotry still exists. But shouldn’t racial bigotry be fought, rather than institutionalized? I certainly believe so.
So capitalizing a descriptive word like color to describe a person is a huge step backwards. It is part of the regression to tribalism. The rise of civilization is the rise of individualism, so the current rise in tribalism literally signals the invasion of savagery into civilization. Like a deadly virus, tribalism threatens to destroy it. Collectivism and individualism cannot coexist.
Many, if not most, major media outlets have fallen all over themselves to comply with this Woke outrage. These include the Associated Press, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the New Jersey Star-Ledger (which capitalize black only), the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Fox News Media (which capitalize black, white, brown, etc.). Shame on them. If they really want to correct the long-standing wrong of racism, they should simply abandon racism in all of its hideous manifestations. This style change is consistent with Ibram X. Kendi’s primitive doctrine that “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” and just as racist.
Stop capitalizing skin color. It is anti-Enlightenment, unjust, racist, and uncivilized.
Related Reading:
Racism—Ayn Rand
The Founding Fathers, Not ‘Diversity,’ is the Solution to ‘Our Racialized Society’
The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’
Fighting Racism With Collectivism is No Way to Exterminate Racism
America: A Racist Nation? By Andrew Bernstein
Martin Luther King Jr. and the Fundamental Principle of America by me for The Objective Standard
‘Antiracism’ Was Never the Right Answer By Pamela Paul for The New York Times
Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle
