Erik Larson is a smart guy and a good author. His latest book, The Demon of Unrest, reads like a novel. It is a fascinating account of what led to the shelling of Fort Sumter and the start of the Civil War. Charleston’s high society of planters and slaveholders is vividly contrasted with the life of slaves.
Unfortunately, Larson has contemporized this history by adopting the modern convention and grammatical inconsistency of writing the word “Black” with a capital “B” while writing the word “white” with no capitalization. The capitalized and uncapitalized words are used so often throughout the book that they become an annoyance and a distraction—and they left this reader wondering if Larson had also played loose with historical facts in order to appeal to modern sensibilities.
A saving grace in this regard is that he wasn’t afraid to mention that a Choctaw Indian had been a slaveholder.
There is nothing untoward about capitalizing “Black,” since this is in keeping with the longstanding convention of capitalizing proper nouns. Proper nouns include the names of races and ethnic groups, or for short, ethnocultural groups.
There are hundreds of unique ethnocultural groups in the world, and the name of each one is capitalized. The interested reader can see a list of names at the following link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_contemporary_ethnic_groups
There is something untoward, however, in not capitalizing the word “white” when the word is used as a proper noun in reference to an ethnocultural group, or race if you will. That would be the group that was once known as Caucasian, among other names.
The net result is that the names of hundreds of ethnocultural groups are capitalized, except for one.
On a personal note, for many years, my ethnocultural group of Italian was not known as either Caucasian or white. It was known by names that are too offensive to repeat here.
What explains the inconsistency of “Black” and other groups being capitalized but “white” not being capitalized?
First of all, it is naive to expect anything to do with race in America to be rational, consistent and logical. That’s especially so among America’s intelligentsia.
“Intelligentsia” is not synonymous with “intelligent,” as the Columbia Journalism Review demonstrates. On June 16, 2020, the Review published the article, “Why we capitalize “Black” and not “white.” The article should’ve been titled, “Why we publish hogwash.”
The Columbia University School of Journalism is considered the best journalism school in the US. Consequently, its teachings pervade news rooms across the country. That means that its hogwash about capitalization pervades news rooms.
The worst argument in the article for not capitalizing “white” is that the capitalization of the word “risks following the lead of white supremacists.” That’s akin to saying that “black” shouldn’t be capitalized because it hearkens back to the Black Panthers.
Well, I’m going to capitalize “White” in the rest of this essay, although I am the antithesis of a supremacist, given that I was at the leading edge of equal rights and equal opportunity over my business career. It’s a safe bet that I’m at the 99th percentile in the number of Blacks that I hired and advanced and the number of Whites that I fired for racial insensitivity or discrimination.
A major learning over those years was that people of all races, skin shades and circumstances thrive with adult-to-adult relationships. Conversely, they don’t thrive with parent-to-child relationships or child-to-child relationships.
An adult-to-adult relationship is when both parties treat each other as . . . well, as mature adults. They deal with each with respect, with forthrightness, with mutuality, and with constructive feedback.
A parent-to-child relationship is when one party—usually the one in authority—treats the other party as a child. The “parent” can be stern, authoritarian and judgmental, or can be permissive and an enabler of childish behavior. Either way, the “child” reacts with even more childish behavior, such as emotional outbursts and immature expectations.
A child-to-child relationship is when both parties behave immaturely, have a juvenile view of the world, and feed on each other negatively.
Much of what passes for enlightened race relations today is not adult-to-adult. It is not adult-to-adult, for example, to embrace cancel culture, safe zones, victimology, identity politics, the ugly racial stereotypes of critical race theory, or the exclusionary practices of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Nor is it adult-to-adult for well-off Whites to be paternalistic toward so-called minorities and to convey moral superiority by pretending to feel guilty and morally inferior over what Whites have done historically to minorities. A form of this self-flagellation is to claim that Whites don’t even deserve to be capitalized.