Concurrent to the surge of dispute on racial justice following the despicable murder of George Floyd, journalists have become more apt to promulgate their abhorrence of racism. Though the precise manner of this promulgation varies between writers, there are several commonalities, one being an emphasis on capitalizing Black when referring to people and, in some cases, culture. 

Now, I have no particular quarrel with this practice. Indeed, the arguments mounted in its favor seem, at the very least, tenable. As Alexandria Neason (a writer for the Columbia Journalism Review) put it, "if we are going to capitalize Asian and South Asian and Indigenous, for example, groups that include myriad ethnic identities united by shared race and geography and, to some degree, culture, then we also have to capitalize Black." Certainly, the rationality of Neason's argument is apparent. 

That being said, I do take issue with the capricious nature of one facet of such racial grammar: capitalizing Black while retaining a lowercase 'w' in white. This opinion of mine, as far as I'm aware, doesn't stem from an offense to some racial pride, some tribalistic sense of white nationalism — indeed, I'm conscious of no strong emotions I've attached to the de-capitalization of white, nor any substantial value I've ascribed to my race. Rather, I simply see this dual practice, capitalizing Black and not white, as inconsistent. 

Of course, numerous journalists have argued against this perception, producing several reasons for their incongruent capitalization. Such rationales are encapsulated by Mike Laws' statement "Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists" (ibid.). In essence, many hold Black to denote a coincident synthesis of cultural identity: something the vague umbrella term 'white' purportedly lacks. 

I dissent from this line of reasoning for one, principal reason: the aforementioned arguments in favor of capitalizing Black, as offered by Alex Neason, may be applied to the term 'white' just as easily. If we accept the current definition of white as articulated by the U.S. Census Bureau (i.e., white as "[a] person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa"), then surely we have to capitalize white "if we are going to capitalize Asian and South Asian and Indigenous … groups that include myriad ethnic identities united by shared race and geography and, to some degree, culture…" If whites are implicitly defined as descendants of those native to lands generally surrounding the Mediterranean, and if we accept (as seems obvious given the pervasion of white as an adjective to describe various customs and tendencies) that many whites tend towards certain cultural qualities — in roughly the same manner as Black, Asian, South Asian, and Indigenous people — then it seems apparent, at least to me, that consistency demands the capitalization of both Black and White.