Capitalization of Black and white

We capitalize Black as a description of people of the African diaspora to differentiate between culture and color. The capital letter is meant to confer recognition of and respect for African American identity. The struggle to have Black be capitalized is about a century old, beginning with W.E.B. Du Bois advocating for capitalization of Negro in the 1920s. You can read about it here.

At this time, we choose not to capitalize the w in white because, in the words of journalist and scholar Lori Tharps, white people “haven’t spent the last 400 years trying to disassociate their cultural heritage from models of inferiority and endemic pathologies.”

The Associated Press also updated their guidelines in 2020 to capitalize Black and lowercase white, citing similar reasoning.