I'll try to simplify in a thread. The push to capitalize Black, spearheaded by Black people, has been underway for many decades. The capital letter is not simply a random linguistic power grab. It depends on an important argument about the difference between race and ethnicity.
The modern conception of race is very different from ethnicity and is also inseparable from whiteness. Race is a category imposed from the outside. Ethnicity is positive, it's what you grew up with: your foodways, body language, art, customs.
When race was first invented (by white people) and started to become separate from ethnicity in the modern era, it was also inseparable from the denial of humanity to non-white people who were being enslaved and colonized.
In this era, Black people in the diaspora were subject to a cultural genocide in which they were racialized as Black but denied ethnicity. They were said to have no culture, because white people had done their best to destroy their diverse languages, religions, ways of life.
White people today have both race and ethnicity. They experience race as mostly neutral and invisible, because they are the "default subjects" of the racial system. If they are reminded they have a race, they tend to get angry and resentful about it, but they benefit from it.
They also have many diverse ethnicities and express those ethnicities freely. An expression of ethnicity from a white person can be anything from regional college football culture to Irish-American parades to Cajun cooking.
However, Black people have been racialized in a way that their ethnicity is denied. The culture(s) they express is are reduced to race by the dominant system. This has really bad material effects and drove a lot of reactionary policies like welfare reform and the 90s crime bill.
So let's get back to capital letters. It's the custom in English to capitalize ethnicities. We spell Cajun not cajun, to refer to an earlier example. So capitalizing "Black" is a demand that Black ethnicity and culture be recognized. It's a statement of resilience too...
... basically saying "You tried to take our culture away, but you failed." So spelling Black with a capital B acknowledges that it can also be used as an ethnic umbrella encompassing the Black diaspora, and is not solely a racial category.
Whiteness and Blackness are the two poles of the modern system of race. But there are other kinds of racialization and capitalization also plays into that. The AP Style Guide is now capitalizing Black and also now capitalizing Indigenous. Indigenous is also an ethnic umbrella.
Language is constantly evolving and words make sense only in relation to each other in a given moment of history. A few hundred years from now we may be using different words entirely. But for this moment it makes sense and it's what many people who are most affected want.
I don't see any point in capitalizing white because white is not an ethnicity and does not deserve any extra respect! Whiteness is the base of the entire racial system we're stuck with. We should be trying to get rid of whiteness entirely, not enshrining it.
Individual white people already have ethnicities, such as Irish or Cajun or whatever, and those are already capitalized. And those ethnicities should also not be restricted to whiteness. There are Black Irish people for example. So white doesn't even work as an ethnic umbrella.
Lastly, white supremacists really really really want "white" to be capitalized. And white supremacists suck. So we should piss them off by resolving to keep it uncapitalized.
OK I wrote all this without even having seen that WaPo is gonna start capitalizing "white" 🙄 It's complete bullshit but unsurprising. This kind of "both sides" stuff is a typical preserve-the-status-quo-at-all-costs move that ends up defending white supremacy.
