Seeing this @CJR joint circulating...opinions vary & i understand journalists may feel differently, but I’ve said it before & I’ll say it again— imho this is the wrong approach. “White” does not “merely describe skin color.” It is a racial category with material & social meaning.

Whiteness is not incidental. It’s not just skin color. In fact, no racial category is just about skin color. Whiteness is a thing. Whiteness is endowed with social meaning that allows people to move through the world in a way that people who are not white are not able to do.

As I’ve said before, my thinking on this has changed over time + for me it’s almost less about grammar, more about the theorizing/working definition of race that’s behind it. Folks can vary widely in their practices on this, but “white merely describes skin color” is not the wave