The capital B isn’t helping and fuels identity branding
Capitalizing the ‘B’ in black isn’t progress—it’s identity branding. This symbolic shift promotes division, double standards, and resentment, not unity.
In 2020, major media outlets like the Associated Press, New York Times, and countless universities began capitalizing the “B” in Black. Not just as a racial descriptor, but as a symbol of collective identity.
To them, this change was a form of respect, a long-overdue correction, and a signal that black Americans deserved cultural recognition and capitalized dignity.
But for those of us who live and think outside the mainstream progressive hive mind, the capital “B” wasn’t a correction. It was a rebranding of identity politics into a linguistic weapon.
And like most top-down ideological campaigns disguised as compassion, it’s doing far more harm than good.
Language as a tool of control
The moment you start capitalizing “Black” to mean something more than a color or ethnic descriptor, you’re no longer talking about individuals. You’re signaling allegiance to a collectivist framework. One that reduces people to their skin color, their “lived experience,” and their presumed oppression.
Worse, these linguistic shifts are not organic. They’re mandated by media corporations, universities, and HR departments, with dissent discouraged or stigmatized. You either comply, or you risk being labeled insensitive, or worse.
This isn’t about grammar. It’s about ideology. And if you’re against it, they brand you ‘hateful’ because they’re too lazy to come up with a counterargument.
The hidden message behind the capital “B”
When the Left insists on capitalizing “Black” but leaves “white” lowercase, or avoids “white” altogether, it creates a power imbalance on purpose.
It implies that one group is culturally meaningful and the other is guilty by default. That one group speaks with collective authority, while the other must shut up and listen. That identity is destiny, and dissent is betrayal.
This isn’t inclusion. It’s racial essentialism in new packaging. Even worse? It convinces that group they’ll amount to nothing unless they lean on the “powers that be.” Unfortunately for them, my Italian brethren busted that myth. Il sono Italiano, in case you were wondering.
Division by design
Ironically, the louder the rhetoric gets around diversity and equity, the more fragile race relations seem to become. Why?
Because these policies and symbolic gestures aren’t bridges; they’re wedges.
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Mandatory diversity training creates resentment.
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Affirmative action breeds mistrust.
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Capitalizing racial identities signals separation, not unity.
You can’t pretend we’re all equal under the law while simultaneously demanding special grammar rules for specific groups.
The Fallout: More tension, not less
If identity continues to be politicized, branded, and ranked in importance by capital letters and DEI checklists, hate crimes may go up, not down. And that’s the last thing any decent human being wants to see.
Not because European mutts like me (I’m also Scandinavian, British, and Balkan) are inherently racist.
But resentment festers when people are told they must accept double standards.
If someone feels like they can’t speak freely, get a fair shot, or question the rules without being demonized, some will lash out. Some will become radicalized. That’s human nature, and it’s why censorship and symbolic superiority always backfire.
And when they do, the same people who engineered the climate will blame everyone but themselves.
A Better Alternative: Individualism over identity
Here’s a radical idea: lowercase black, lowercase white, and uppercase nationality or place of descent.
Let people be people. Judge them by their actions, values, and character. Not their race or the letter we use to describe it.
The more we double down on individual rights, personal agency, and equal treatment before natural law, the better chance we have at genuine unity, skin color be damned.
Not performative unity that those who think themselves morally superior embrace. Real unity. The kind that doesn’t require an asterisk, a cultural Marxist re-education seminar, or a capital letter.
Capital letter for nationality, lowercase letter for skin color
The capital “B” may seem like a small thing. But it’s symbolic of something much larger, and far more corrosive.
When we let language become a tool for ideological branding, we turn people into mascots for a cause, rather than sovereign individuals with minds of their own.
If we want a less divided world, we need fewer capital letters, and a lot more lowercase humility.
I actually warn about this in my book Spirit and Fire
In the short, dark epic fantasy novel, you’ll learn that Mali LaSalle’s ancestors oppressed the Native Tamurians a millennium before the events of the book. Mali had nothing to do with it, but mere centuries before Spirit and Fire’s events, someone brought many Native Tamurians out of oppression.
Her name was Morgana I, who raided Tamuria, defeated the descendants of those settlers, and shunted them into an Untouchable caste. To add insult to injury, Morgana painfully branded them through a fire and blood ritual with scarred ‘X’s’ on their hands for easy identification.
That ritual persists in Spirit and Fire under the rule of Morgana’s descendant, King Magnu. While those of Native Tamurian descent who sided with Morgana are living “middle-class” lives, others who went against her and Mali’s relatives, those of Fennoscandian descent, continue to wallow in abject poverty.
The divide has been brewing thanks to the sheer collective guilt of the Fennoscandians. But Mali is slowly but surely becoming their beacon of rebellion.
