One commenter wrote, “(By the way anybody else notice that Hispanic, African-American, or Asian all get flagged by the spell checker if they aren’t capitalized, but white just sails right on through? When are they going to fix that?) ”
Commenter L responded:
I know, it’s almost as though whoever programs the spellchecker thinks that “white” isn’t related to a specific geographical location, and thinks that nouns and modifiers that refer to a specific geographical location are always capitalized in English, and thinks that modifiers that are basic colors are not capitalized in English.
For my part, I capitalize neither “black” nor “white” in any context (except as first word in a sentence, as part of a title, etc.)
But then, I always capitalize “Hitler” and “Satan,” and never capitalize “baby” or “puppy,” so I’m sure you can tell where my sympathies lie, if you are one of those who understand that capitalization has nothing to do with rules of English usage, and everything to do with a secret political agenda dictated from our socialist PC (no pun intended) masters in Redmond.
The Germans, of course, capitalize every noun, and no modifiers at all, a harsh system of inequality that the German Karl Marx railed against in his influential 1867 work “Das Kapital.”