Making the case for lowercase
Why racial descriptors don’t need to be capitalized
In 2020, the reassessment of race relations in the U.S. produced an orthographic kerfuffle about whether and how to capitalize accepted terms for racial, ethnic and gender-defined groups.
Fissures opened in news media — not merely about whether to use “African American” or “black American” to denote Americans of African descent — but whether to capitalize “Black” and, at the same time, whether to continue to lowercase “white” and how to handle these choices for other groups. These debates hinged on determinations about the cultural identity of those groups. The outcomes were not what we might have expected.
Associated Press and The New York Times style guide updates indicated that “Black” should be capitalized, while “white” should not. The Times writes: “There has been no comparable movement toward widespread adoption of a new style for ‘white,’ and there is less of a sense that ‘white’ describes a shared culture and history. Moreover, hate groups and white supremacists have long favored the uppercase style, which in itself is reason to avoid it.”
One month later, The Washington Post opted to enforce an uppercase standard for “White” and “Black” Americans, arguing that white Europeans do possess a distinct cultural and historical identity that merits acknowledgment in style guides. Using similar logic, the National Association of Black Journalists and the racial equity organization Race Forward also issued style guidelines that capitalize “White” and “Black.”
This intense focus on names — how others refer to us and how we refer to ourselves — is of course not new and always needs to be taken seriously. Language is the primary tool we have for managing the construction of reality. But why should anyone specifically care about uppercase and lowercase usage guidelines?
The word “capital” derives from the Latin capitalis, or “of the head.” In the history of the languages using the Latin alphabet, the uppercase or capital letter is the king and lowercase letters are the royal subjects. “Uppercase” is not so different from “upper class.” Capital letters lead sentences into battle. Capitalization can denote the champions and heroes within each sentence. Debates about capitalization are debates about power. Who has it and who doesn’t. Who rules and who obeys.
The presence (or absence) of capital letters to denote cultural identity — or its absence — tilts the earth. How could it not, if the intent of the uppercase is to project power? But ironies abound.
Consider this sentence from a newsletter published Aug. 24 by historian Heather Cox Richardson: “Because of the wealth gap between white and Black Americans — the average white family has ten times the wealth of the average Black family — more Black students borrow to finance their education.”
White people have 10 times more wealth, but Black people have a capitalized adjective. Who is the winner here?
One can well imagine that the white family might object, orthographically speaking, to being given the short end of the stick. Certainly not enough to trade their additional wealth. Perhaps enough to vote for Donald Trump. Conversely, it is impossible to imagine that the Black family would not happily trade their top tier in the case wars for the white family’s additional wealth. The point being, if we can’t have everything — which we can’t — why not have the most important thing?
The premise of these case wars is that capital letters matter, that they are scarce and non-fungible signals of status and power. And that for this reason, we cannot live without them. And because capital letters represent contested terrain, we are willing to go to war over them.
But what if capital letters are not needed at all? What if capital letters are a vestigial legacy of fixed typeset publishing and conventions emerging from page formatting and space limitation imperatives? The printed page has its own politics. The printed page requires its own forms of order and obedience, but they do not need to be ours.
In the digital age, informal communication has encouraged the relaxation of usage rules. The internet is nothing if not informal. Texting, instant messaging and Twitter posts routinely ignore capitalization conventions. (Avoiding the shift key saves time.) Many computer programming languages also avoid capital letters. Emoji now freely mingle with letters.
In contrast, the use of all-caps in social media — as in this famously mocked Donald Trump tweet to the president of Iran — denotes SHOUTING, in which the noise overrides the signal.
Consider the alternative. It is almost impossible to get agitated by a statement presented entirely in lowercase. Eliminating the keyboard shift key — and with it the capital letter — instantly restores flow to our communications. If we really want to democratize language, we should do away with capital letters altogether.
Off with their heads! It might just save the world.
Peter Schwartz is a writer based in the Pacific Northwest. He has a doctorate in political philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley, taught at the university level and founded an online legal news and data company. He publishes the Substack newsletter Wikidworld.