"Capitalization Is Not in Itself a Marker of Understanding or Respect"

"Behind the push to capitalize is the desire to define blackness, and it is a desire that I think we should be wary of. Any major conventional shift ought to be interrogated for its motivations and its implications. In this case, the shift has been touted as a radical (and antiracist) break from a (racist) past. But capitalization—the linguistic convention, but also the politics and theory behind it—is not new, and is indeed deeply anti-radical. Capitalization remains tied to what came before—to the conceptual framework and language of antiblackness—by its base and reductive impulse: by the desire to define."

Nicholas Whittaker at The Drift explains "Why We Shouldn't Capitalize 'Black.'"