"When I compare the cultural, intellectual and historical heft of the three categories, 'Black' comes out well ahead of 'white' and 'brown.'"

"We have whole libraries of books and articles about 'Blackness,' world-beating traditions of music and literature, even entire academic departments 30 to 50 years old specializing in African American/black studies. Compared with blackness, whiteness and brownness are severely under-theorized.... [And] I considered the asymmetry of racial identities of blackness and whiteness — and how they function differently in American history and culture. These two identities don’t simply mirror each other — one works through a pronounced group identity; the other more often is lived as unraced individuality. However much you might see yourself as an individual, if you’re black, you also have to contend with other people’s views. W.E.B. Du Bois summed this up as 'twoness,' as seeing yourself as yourself but also knowing that other people see you as a black person. You don’t have to be a black nationalist to see yourself as black. In contrast, until quite recently white Americans rarely saw themselves as raced — as white. Most of them, anyway. The people who have embraced 'white' as a racial identity have been white nationalists, Ku Klux Klansmen and their ilk. Thanks to President Trump, white nationalists are more visible than ever in our public spaces. But that group does not determine how most white people see themselves. Instead, in terms of racial identity, white Americans have had the choice of being something vague, something unraced and separate from race. A capitalized 'White' challenges that freedom, by unmasking 'Whiteness' as an American racial identity as historically important as 'Blackness' — which it certainly is. No longer should white people be allowed the comfort of this racial invisibility; they should have to see themselves as raced. Being racialized makes white people squirm, so let’s racialize them with that capital W."

From "Why ‘White’ should be capitalized, too" by Nell Irvin Painter, the author of "The History of White People," who originally thought only "Black" should be capitalized (WaPo).

But what if being racialized doesn't make white people squirm? Just go back to the lower-case "w"? How does this dynamic of systemic white supremacy work? Why are you trusting white people to stick to feeling bad about the race you want them to pay much more attention to?