www.DonnaLamb.com

Each of the articles posted here on my website was chosen because the information provided in it is as timely now as the day I wrote it. The event, for example, may be over, but the struggle it was about continues.

As you read some of these articles, you will no doubt notice that even though I don't capitalize the word "white" when alluding to European Americans, I do capitalize "Black" when referring to people of African ancestry born in the United States. That's what, starting with the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, many African Americans chose to call themselves as a term of racial pride. Therefore, I see Black as carrying the same weight and deserving the same respect as Latino, Asian, European or any other proper noun.

The term white, however, has a totally different origin. It is not a name we chose to give ourselves, but rather a word assigned to us all the way back in 1691 when the Virginia legislature first used the phrase "white man or woman" in a law - and not for an honorable reason, either.

In short, the legislature's objective was to stop disenfranchised people of European extraction - servants, tenant farmers, the urban poor, soldiers and sailors - from identifying with the Indigenous peoples and people of African descent because, if unified, they might rise up together and overthrow the ruling elite whom they vastly outnumbered. Therefore, certain rights and privileges denied to others - such as buying land and carrying guns - were given to all whites, including indentured servants. This move was designed to separate whites from - and make them feel superior to - people of color so they would align themselves, instead, with the white elite. This ploy succeeded all too well, unfortunately.

Historically, the word white as applied to European Americans has always been lowercase. I see no reason to break with that tradition now.

I am fully aware, however, of how odd - and perhaps even disparaging to whites - it looks on paper to see Black in uppercase and white in lowercase. The American Heritage Book of English Usage is also well aware of the problem. After stating, "Black is sometimes capitalized in its racial sense, especially in the black press, though the lowercase form is still widely used by authors of all races," it goes on to say:

The capitalization of Black does raise ancillary problems for the treatment of the term white. Orthographic evenhandedness would seem to require the use of uppercase White, but this form might be taken to imply that whites constitute a single ethnic group, an issue that is certainly debatable. Uppercase White is also sometimes associated with the writings of white supremacist groups, which for many people would of itself be sufficient reason to dismiss it. On the other hand, the use of lowercase white in the same context as uppercase Black will obviously raise questions as to how and why the writer has distinguished between the two groups. There is no entirely happy solution to this problem. In all likelihood, uncertainty as to the mode of styling of white has dissuaded many publications from adopting the capitalized form Black.

Well, it has not dissuaded me. And I hope you will not be put off by it, either.