“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” If George Orwell had seen ahead to today’s scramble to make black—but not white—a proper noun when referring to racial groups, he might have cited capitalization, too, as a corruptor of thought.
Jennifer Harvey, evangelist for the anti-racist gospel of Ibram X Kendi, never capitalizes white but always capitalizes Black. She explains why in the introduction to Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America (2020), her child-raising manual for white parents:
This may seem to be either an unfair, or at least a grammatically inappropriate nonparallel use of racial terms. But white identity and Black identity are not parallels. And while language is never perfect, it’s my sense that this is the best way to indicate these different identities. As will become clear in later chapters, African-American communities have created Black identity as a conscious, collective, intentional, historical, and constructive way to self-identify. While different writers make different choices, many of the African-American thinkers I am most indebted to use Black and not black. In contrast, to this point in US racial history, white is not a similarly constructive, conscious, and collective identity that has been claimed—at least not for the purposes of anti-racism. Thus, I always indicate white with the lowercase w.
This sounds like the voice of reason—but it is not. What makes this bit of skewed logic so sinister is its academic simulacrum of rationality. Harvey celebrates among blacks the very same sensibility—embrace of “a conscious, collective, intentional, historical, and constructive way to self-identify”—that is reviled when it is held by whites. It is the mirror image of the demonized mindset of white nationalism, the bogey of the moment. While the number of actual white nationalists alive in 2020 was minuscule, they made—still make—handy whipping boys for entrepreneurs in the race industry.
“Different writers make different choices.” That blunts the racialist edge of the speculative posture at work here. Harvey’s comment leaves the impression that to capitalize or not capitalize one or the other word is a mere stylistic preference. But, no, it is a highly charged politicized position. It is a power play in grammatical drag.
Traditional usage capitalizes Asian, Arab, Hispanic, European, etc., in a rudimentary effort to cite a broad geographic or ethnic origin. The word “Asian,” for instance, does not tell us whether a specific individual is Manchurian, Japanese, Ainu, Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Uyghur, Mongolian, Tibetan, Zhuang, Han, Polynesian, or some other variation. It simply signals that this person is not—to seize one example—an ethnic Scotsman, not even if he lives in the heart of Midlothian.
Black and white are equally broad, make-do expedients that presume to describe skin color alone, not ethnicity or ancestral place of origin. Neither whites nor blacks constitute a single ethnic nor cultural group. Elevating one range of skin colors—black—to a proper noun while assigning another equally variable range—white—in lower case is an exercise in racial one-upmanship.
Which brings me to myself. In light of today’s obsessional race-think, I realize that I had not paid sufficient attention to my racial awareness index. All these many years I just thought of myself as a latch key kid from a lower working class family, one riddled with sorrows, trauma, and immigrant pretension.
The drinking half was Irish Catholic; the other half was an anti-papist mix: Dutch Reformed from Liverpool and Swedish Lutheran from Mariestad. We were a racial cocktail of Celts (Irish Gaels), Anglo-Saxons (with likely some Pict back when) and Norse. Among the Celtic half are a few “black Irish”—dark haired and brown eyed anomalies in a blue-eyed, red-headed clan. That means there is likely more Anglo-Norman in a Mullarkey [Ó Maoilearca] than Cherokee in Elizabeth Warren. Plus, I have a soft spot for Vikings.
Moreover, one of a figure painter’s first lessons from the rigors of color mixing is that there is no such thing as white skin. No black skin either. As I explained not long ago in The Federalist:
The study of tonal value, the range of light to dark, is an essential aspect of painting.
Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts once ran an ingenious class in color mixing. Students were assigned to achieve, in oils, a precise match to the skin tone of everyone else in the course. Only the three primary colors — two variants of each — plus a tube of titanium white were permitted. No tube black allowed. Black had to be achieved on the palette with admixtures of the primaries. Tempered with white, this lively “black” yielded beautiful grays needed to harmonize tonal shifts in every skin color in the room. Amounts of white varied from person to person but were never absent.
In terms of palette practice, Uglow’s portrait of Marigold could readily be titled “Harmony in Blue and Orange.” The artist suggested as much, in pictorial code, by the pure cobalt of the woman’s dress and that undefined hint—a chair back, perhaps?—of yellow-orange behind her. [The skin tones of the nude above simply required more titanium white than did Marigold. But they included the same mix of pigments: cobalt blue, orange and Naples yellow.]
In sum—now I know better than I used to. In truth, I am of mixed race. And a person of color.
A bit more of Jennifer Harvey
In 2014, Ms. Harvey and her lesbian fiancée applied for a same-sex marriage license. In that same year, she produced Dear White Christians: For Those Still Hungry for Racial Reconciliation. Revised in 2020, the book “calls justice-committed Christians to do the gospel-inspired work of opposing racist social structures around them.” As with other gospelers of this stripe, the anti-white racism of blacks (or Blacks, as Harvey would have it) is fastidiously ignored.
The anti-racist industry is premised on the fallacy that racism is a distinctly white pathology. Harvey’s contribution to the grift is her toxic assertion that “the grip of racism in white Christianity runs deep.” To compensate for history’s past racial grievances, whites must confront “white embededness in white families.”
In her progress toward the Celestial City, our pilgrim became ordained in the American Baptist Church. The Rev. Dr. Harvey is currently a high priestess of Christian ethics and Academic Dean at Garrett Evangelical Seminary (Methodist-affiliated) where she continues to instruct white people in soul-conscious ways to shed oppressive white privilege. Antiracism as Daily Practice: Refuse Shame, Change White Communities, and Help Create a Just World (2024) is her blueprint for white redemption.
The sanctimony of the subtitle is perfectly pitched to the pharisaical narcissism and covert hostility of the text. Skip the book. Go directly to the Reverend’s website for her step-by-step guide for twelve days of anti-racist action. Mimicking AA’s twelve step approach to alcoholism, whites can work at recovering from whiteness one day at a time.
Day 9 intones that “whiteness means unjust privileges.” In apparent ignorance of crime statistics, these privileges include “insulation from racist violence and harm.” Day 8 indicts family structure: “We find ourselves part of the same families that made white silence or even active complicity with racism the familial cultural norm.” On Day 5, a black female influencer catechizes insensitive whites on “Loving Your Black Neighbor as Yourself.” Overall, “whiteness in our family systems” is the cancer that can be cured by listening to “feminists of color, including feminist men and other genders of color.”
Reparations are key to mending the breach between races. Do your part by “shifting your resources from mostly white spaces into Black-and Brown-owned spaces . . . .” In short, embrace your own dispossession.
Harvey’s language is an inadvertent tutorial in the sophistry, banality, and plain bad faith of anti-racism. It is the worst kind of racism. It rationalizes bullying toward anyone of European—especially Christian—descent. Posing as sympathy, it demands self-effacement from whites while it sentimentalizes non-whites. The pseudoreality of over-arching white dereliction feeds the delusion of non-white benevolence. There is no room for individuals in this predictable narrative. There are only representatives of racial categories. Abstractions, not persons.
• • • • •
In Abuse of Language/Abuse of Power, Josef Pieper understood the dynamics of anti-racism rhetoric a half century before it emerged in the American academy:
Public discourse itself, separated from the standard of truth, creates on its part, the more it prevails, an atmosphere of epidemic proneness and vulnerabilty to the reign of the tyrant. . . . Serving the tyranny, the corruption and abuse of language becomes better known as propaganda.
The most perfect propaganda contains an element of menace—well-concealed yet subtly visible. Suggestive rather than overt:
Those for whom the menace is intended must nevertheless be led and eased into believing (and that is the true art!) that by acquiescing to the intimidation, they really do the reasonable thing, perhaps even what they would have wanted to do anyway.
To see Pieper’s insight realized, look at the Amazon reviews of Harvey’s books from verified purchasers. On view is revealing testimony from well-intentioned but soft-headed whites anxious to “live on the right side of history” (as the Rev. unsurprisingly puts it)! Her readers, oblivious to the moral hoax of anti-racist distortions, beat their breasts and vow to join the angels.
If the reviews do not unsettle you, you are more sanguine than I am. Such susceptibility to the manipulation of language bodes poorly for our cultural condition.
