This Body is Worthy

“All bodies are worthy, regardless of what they look like and what narratives they have been forced to live inside of.”—Hannah Soyer

After finishing her undergraduate studies, Hannah Soyer started working with her friend Mary Mathis, a photographer, to capture various angles of her body that she felt self-conscious about. Soon, the project started to expand. She and Mathis conducted workshops inviting anyone who felt that their bodies were outside of mainstream, normative ideals to write phrases on their bodies professing their worth. Participants received photographs of their bodies and wrote about the phrases they chose. This Body is Worthy extends past disability to a broader set of marginalized, gendered, and racialized bodies. The project has become a platform that features the work of disabled artists. Proceeds are split between the artists and disability justice organizations.

Disability Theory

I was at a stoplight, and you know that feeling you get when someone’s looking at you? The hair on your arms starts to bristle, neck gets clammy, chest slightly caves in. Well, I got this feeling when I was at the stoplight. So I looked up. Across the street, there was a man—blue overcoat, red plaid shirt, chocolate shoes, dusty jeans. . . looking at me. The light turned green. I walked towards him. He walked towards me. As I turned to offer a smile, he cut me off and said, “How about you and your disabled friends find a car and drive out of San Francisco?”

I was born disabled, so atypical interactions in the world are rather typical, but this transaction threw me off. Emotions surged: anger, confusion, a little surprise, but it was relief that soon exceeded the rest. I had been thinking through a presentation scheduled in London the next day. The topic? Critical design and disability. And I’d finished everything but an opener.
Identifying as a graphic designer and disabled has made me an unrepentant questioner of symbols and society throughout my life. This man saw my body as a problem because it’s not normal. This surfaces two questions: When did challenging the norm become a problem? And what does it mean to be normal to begin with? After committing myself to these questions, I found out that normal is a construct manufactured and fed to society hundreds of years ago. This essay looks at three theories or paradigms for disability: medical, social, and identity-based.
The medical paradigm The origins of the medical (or deficit) model go back to the life of Belgian scientist Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874). By the age of nineteen, he was a blooming scientific prodigy. He studied statistics, mathematics, movement, and terrestrial magnetism, and he had an intense interest in populations. In 1823, he traveled to Paris to study astronomy.
In his magnum opus, A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties, Quetelet introduced the concept of the homme moyen—average man—by applying the Law of Error to bodies. Astronomers were using the Law of Error to plot stars. How? Essentially, find a star in the night sky, take a few guesses about its mathematical location, and average your guesses. The mean (i.e., average) was the most likely location of that star. Quetelet created the homme moyen by applying this method to human features such as height and weight, giving us a statistically defined “normal” body. This set the groundwork for concepts like the BMI (body mass index) and the IQ (intelligence quotient) test, both processes of marking deviant bodies against accepted norms.
As the medical model developed, based on statistics, Sir Francis Galton (1882–1911) came on the scene. Galton was a British eugenicist. The pseudoscience of eugenics is associated with the Holocaust. Galton believed that everyone below average should be rooted out of society. In Quetelet’s equation, the outliers were neutral. But Galton swapped out the mean, exchanging it for the median, and produced another model of normal. Instead of average and outlier, Galton split populations into quartiles that rank human beings first, second, third, and fourth. The ideal body—that is, a body existing above the median— replaced Quetelet’s homme moyen.
When it’s okay to erase human diversity, you don’t plan on diverse bodies being around, and so you don’t design for them. Galton created a corporeal split between deficient and desirable, design-worthy and a design afterthought.
The social paradigm We didn’t begin to unseat this profound erasure until the 1960s, when architectural guidelines began addressing disabled bodies, marking the beginning of a new paradigm.
Let’s imagine that you and I decide to go grab some coffee at a fancy San Francisco coffee shop with a loft and a view of the city. You grab your coffee, you go up one, two, three stairs, and you turn around, noticing I didn’t follow you. You look at me, and I look at you. Then, it gets a little awkward. Stairs aren’t made for legs like mine. Normal gets concretized in the design of places today; thus, eugenic logic, a term coined by disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, isn’t something that simply disappeared after World War II.
These stairs, and countless other examples of eugenic logic applied to the design of spaces and technology, made me become a designer. If I wanted to draw, I had to design ways to do that. If I fell in love with art so much that I wanted to go to art school, I had to design a way to do that. If I went to art school and had to trim a whole bunch of posters, I had to design a way to do that. If I graduated from art school and wanted to practice as a professional, I needed to design a way to answer e-mails. (They don’t tell you that in design school.)
I wouldn’t be a designer today if my mom, Mari Halstead, who happens to be my favorite designer of all time, didn’t invent a way for me to draw. One night we were learning how to say colors for the first time—red, blue, green—and my mom had an idea: Wouldn’t it be nice if I could color the colors as we were talking. On the corner of the table were a bunch of rubber bands. After looking at me, then looking at the rubber bands, my mom leapt across the table and wrapped one around my hand. Then she wedged a marker underneath and effectively started my art career. This early prototype worked all right, but it often snapped after long periods of time.
We made our second apparatus with duct tape. This solved the instability problem, but it was painful to remove, so we made a third prototype. My mom got a wetsuit at a garage sale. She cut out a strip, made a U-shape, and created a cuff. This design provided stability and flexibility, and I used it for the next dozen or so years. It allowed me to draw and paint as well as helping with tasks like eating. This story illustrates the shift to the social paradigm of disability, which separates a person’s impairment from a disabling society. Before my mom and I designed the cuff, the pen was the artifact of a disabling society. I was disabled not because I couldn’t grab a pen but because there wasn’t a pen available that could be fastened to a hand that doesn’t grab. The social paradigm of disability took shape in the 1960s and ’70s. The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, led by African American activists, inspired the Disability Rights movement to fight for accessibility in buildings and schools as a civil right, not as a nice-to-have or an afterthought. In 1990, hundreds of protesters gathered in front of the Capitol building in Washington, DC to claim their civil rights. A group broke off, setting aside wheelchairs and crutches, and crawled up the marble steps. This performative act exposed tangible, physical discrimination and helped instigate the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Today, we think of accessibility as the law. What we call inclusion, with respect to people with disabilities, is what I’d just consider good QA (quality assurance). If we’re going to make things accessible, the people who are using our products and environments should test them and be considered designers themselves. Mainstream design culture is now taking the social model of disability seriously. Big players such as IKEA and Google are getting on board. The Creatability project, a collaboration between Google and NYU, is creating open-source and accessible tools using AI and machine learning so traditionally excluded bodies can contribute creatively. But we’re not going far enough. Scholar Tom Shakespeare identifies three weaknesses with the social model: it undermines the significance of impairment in shaping lived experience; it represents disabled people as always oppressed; and it promotes the concept of a barrier-free utopia (where everyone has access to everything, all of the time). The social model’s strengths are its power and simplicity. For most, conceiving disability as social is paradigm-busting. It does not require new knowledge, just a new frame. But the disability experience is not monolithic: some of us are disabled by society and our bodies; some of us find meaning and identity in our bodies as sites for reexamining and reconfiguring selfhood and society; and universal design is, unfortunately, a myth. Although the access needs of individuals often overlap, they sometimes conflict. If viewed uncritically, the social model has the insidious potential to reify existing power structures and discourage difference. Because the social model focuses rigidly on the environment, nondisabled designers often believe they can apply this model without the help or insight of disabled people. Thus, accessible design can be popularized without authentically engaging with disability communities. Shifting the focus from bodies to society excludes those bodies from the conversation. Designers end up creating objects and services through their own worldviews, consulting a toolkit or checklist to make their solutions accessible to “others.” From this angle, the social model doesn’t move us far from the medical model. Although we aren’t normalizing or rehabilitating bodies, we end up trying to normalize or rehabilitate the environment in lieu of exploring plurality and difference. Let’s return to the cuff example from my childhood. My mother and I designed an apparatus that would allow me to draw. Our solution, however, left social structures untouched. We weren’t only designing a useful prosthetic; we were designing a tool to support independent self-expression in a socially acceptable way. Materially, the cuff affirmed the use of an extant tool and hand for self-expression. Symbolically, it reified the colonial notion that photorealistic representation is superior to modes that are more abstruse. Politically, it prioritized independence over interdependence. We designed the cuff to help me fit into an ableist world, and it delivered on that promise. I highlight this example not to critique assistive devices but to foreground the lost occasion to critically examine society. In a world designed for nondisabled people, we absolutely need products that fit disabled people into an unchanged, unquestioned world. I used such devices to get through grade school. But if our questioning stops here, so does our understanding of disability, design, and society. The identity paradigm Artist Neil Marcus writes, “Disability is not a brave struggle or courage in the face of adversity. Disability is an art. It’s an ingenious way to live.” For Marcus, disability is a generative identity, and this has radical implications for design. When we reorient beliefs about disability-loss toward disability-gain, designers can begin to realize that access issues transcend the environment. Becoming an “inclusive” designer requires transformative work from the inside out. Alex Haagaard is an Autistic designer and disability activist-scholar. In 2019, they created thirty drawings representing aspects of Autistic experience. Haagaard also posted a list of artistic prompts for others in the #ActuallyAutistic community, ranging from “comfort” and “texture” to “uncertainty,” “flap,” and “movement.” After Haagaard posted these prompts on Twitter, a respondent questioned number 15: “glitter.” Haagaard explained that their experience is fluid. Although they appreciate low-sensory environments, sometimes glitter is a favorite visual stim. The respondent said, “Got it!” and posted a link to a glitter-filled room in Tokyo designed by teamLab. You probably wouldn’t think of glitter if I asked you to design something with autism in mind. Challenging the disability-as-problem paradigm centers difference. It took one prompt (“glitter”) to shift attention from design platitudes to unexpected queer-crip aesthetics. Disability becomes an identity—a standpoint for resisting normalization and amplifying nonconformity. Downstream access design, like my own cuff example, needs to continue. Not every project presents an opportunity to unseat hegemonic norms and ways of relating with each other and the world. But we need to make space for the identity paradigm. Often, when designers want to learn about disability, their instinct is to interview a doctor or peruse PubMed. Resources like this typically reflect the medical (or deficit) model of disability, which limits creativity. Some projects do require medical data, but it’s important to learn from multiply marginalized disabled people, disability activists, and disability studies scholars. In closing, here are two places to start: hire disabled people and work toward demedicalizing and decolonizing the disability–design nexus. Invite Black, Disabled, Indigenous, Latinx, Mad, Neuroqueer, Trans, Two-Spirit, and other historically marginalized people and communities to share their perspectives with your design program or company (and pay them, please). Not only are marginalized people experts on their own oppression, but they are also designers themselves. Don’t assume that a community needs your students or company to organize a design charette—they have likely organized themselves for decades. Inclusive design must dismantle power structures within ourselves and the institutions we occupy as much as those in society. Make no mistake, this is subversive work. We’ve learned about the construct of normalcy—what it means to be normal and not normal. We’ve explored the medical, social, and identity paradigms of disability. After I learned about teamLab’s glitter room, I couldn’t resist taking a look at their logo. As it turns out, their logo is a star. Ironic. Quetelet, if you remember, manufactured the “average” human by recycling a methodology for plotting stars. So I’ll leave you with this thought: the questions we ask become the stars we follow

Binary Stucture

Philosopher Judith Butler challenged the belief that gender identity is a fixed state of being in her groundbreaking 1990 book, Gender Trouble. Whereas many feminist writers at that time sought to define the essence of being of a woman, Butler questioned “male” and “female” as socially constructed categories. She argued that notions of universal womanhood reinforce the binary upon which gender oppression depends. Gender Trouble presents two ideas that help us think about feminism, sexuality, and design: first, the concept of the gender matrix, which questions the male/female binary, and second, the concept of gender as performance, a set of repetitive gestures that replicate and enact the gender binary.

Let’s start with the gender matrix. This oppressive structure sets fixed points of desire and identity. The polarities of sex (biological characteristics) connect to the polarities of sexuality (desire for other people) to produce a person’s gender identity (the internal, psychic sense of being male or female) and sexual orientation (being straight or gay). The matrix excludes shifts and nuances of identity and desire.
The gender matrix is embedded everywhere in society, from family structures to dress codes. The matrix requires people to be either male or female, and it dictates desire for the “opposite sex” as the only healthy and natural mode of attraction. The matrix pressures each individual to accept a stable identity and adhere to fixed sexual attractions. While some societies accept gender practices that resist the matrix, others condemn them.
Over time, nonconforming behaviors can break out of the matrix and change the culture. Butler writes, “As the effects of a subtle and politically enforced performativity, gender is an ‘act,’ as it were, that is open to splittings, self-parody, and exaggeration.” When drag performers parody gender codes, they show how fragile these norms really are.
Butler’s work rejects rigid definitions of gender and the search for ancient matriarchies and female-only futures. According to Butler, any notion of fixed gender identity upholds oppressive binaries. Furthermore, feminists who insist on a universal, vulva-centered womanhood perpetuate colonialist and racist power structures by ignoring the category of Whiteness. Defining womanhood as a transhistorical, cross-cultural mode of being denies the oppressive force of White privilege.
Building on Butler’s philosophical deconstruction of the binary, younger writers and activists developed the concept of fluid gender identity, replacing closed binaries with more open spectrums. Activist Jacob Tobia writes, “As people, our identities change over our lifetimes. This applies to transgender and cisgender people alike. Everyone has a gender that evolves.” The way that you embody your manhood or femininity can shift throughout your life and in different settings.
Like Tobia, Butler argues that gender is an unstable phenomenon, “a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred, never fully what it is at any given juncture in time.” Not everyone has a fluid experience of gender, however. Many people who are cis, trans, intersex, genderqueer, gender neutral, or nonbinary feel firmly locked into their identity.
Tobia points out that mainstream media enforces the gender binary by defining success for a transgender person as being able to pass as the gender they identify with. Telling a trans person that they look like a “real woman” or a “real man” solidifies restrictive views of gender.
The matrix is limiting and oppressive because it demands each individual to have an essential identity as either male or female and heterosexual or homosexual. Each person enacts and reinforces the matrix by finding their place within it and behaving according to its rules.
When individuals enact the socially constructed attributes of gender (such as “girls wear dresses”), they replicate and reinforce social rules and expectations. According to Butler, the process of “doing” makes the “doer,” rather than the other way around. We are what we enact. Performance creates the performer. Norms become visible and dominant because they are repeated across society—by individuals and families as well as by movies, TV shows, fashion, advertising, toys, and so on. Subversive ways of performing gender, such as appearing in drag or adopting a butch or femme persona, disrupt the matrix by switching its polarities.
Butler’s phrase “styles of the flesh” refers to varied modes of gender performance. Such styles come from society and are performed by individuals. From valley girls and soccer moms to jocks, nerds, bros, and bears, gender styles are roles to play and identities to wear. People challenge norms by mixing styles and inventing new ones. For example, in popular culture, the fashion model is a pinnacle of body normativity; fashion ideals are subverted and appropriated by drag culture. We model our behavior on performances that we witness and aspire to, and, in turn, our own behavior becomes a model for others.
People perform different ways in different contexts. Think about how your speaking voice, vocabulary, and body language might shift in various settings, such as a college classroom, a client presentation, a hardware store, a family dinner table, or an apartment with friends. For people of color or people who are trans, intersex, genderqueer, gender neutral or nonbinary, the ability to code-switch (putting on a “White voice” or a “masculine voice”) can be a matter of survival.
Designers contribute to the social construction of gender when they use stylistic cues to suggest masculine or feminine characteristics. In Western culture, soft colors and loopy scripts typically are associated with feminine values, while hard edges and neutral tones are considered more masculine. These associations are repeated and reinforced over time, making them a legible vocabulary.
When designers make choices about colors, fonts, textures, symbols, motifs, and images, they are performing styles— and sometimes inventing new ones or generating new meanings through shifts in context. To create a zine, poster, or website is to mobilize codes, structures, and technologies that are already in place, such as typefaces, printers, servers, and platforms. Such systems exist before and beyond the practice of graphic design. No matter how original a new font or logo might seem, some of its elements come from history and culture. The performance of graphic design is never wholly original or fully liberated from rules.
So, too, the performance of gender occurs within and against the matrix imposed by society. In Butler’s words, “To enter into the repetitive practices of this terrain of signification is not a choice, for the ‘I’ that might enter is always already inside....The task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself.” Butler’s stunning description of freedom and constraint, originality and repetition, parallels the limits and opportunities of the designer’s practice. This practice is embedded in a dense weave of social patterns, from the gender matrix to structures of racism and class difference.

Anti-stair Club

In 2019, artist and designer Shannon Finnegan organized the Anti-Stairs Club protest at the Vessel, a public sculpture conceived by Thomas Heatherwick in New York City. Consisting of 154 staircases, the Vessel resembles a giant vase or basket. Although the Vessel meets accessibility requirements by including an elevator, riding the elevator is not equivalent to traversing the sculpture’s elaborate staircases.
Disability advocates argue that public amenities should holistically incorporate inclusive design principles. Designers often fulfill accessibility regulations in a perfunctory way. Participants in the Anti-Stairs Club protest signed a statement vowing to never use the Vessel’s stairs. Finnegan designed custom cushions adorned with a crossed-out staircase and a zine printed with letters shaped like stairs. According to Finnegan, “We need to focus on centering disability culture and acknowledging the complexity and nuance of disabled people. I know this will not happen without the presence of disabled people as designers, artists, thinkers, leaders, and creators.” Inclusive design is a collaborative process.

Typography Binaries

Binary categories are under attack. Advocates for racial justice have challenged racial binaries, which marginalize people of color while enshrining White supremacy. LGBTQIA+ activists are dismantling the male/female polarity, which enforces gender norms and compulsory heterosexuality. Environmentalists are unraveling oppositions such as nature/culture and human/animal, which justify human domination and destruction of the planet.
What is the role of binary thinking in Western typography? Invented in Germany in the fifteenth century, printing with metal type became the first form of mass production. Mechanized letters hastened changes in religion, science, literature, law, and commerce. The rapid spread of typography coincided with the age of Western colonial conquest and techno-scientific exploitation of the Earth’s resources. Typography—a tool and medium for these world-changing developments—quickly adopted binary structures. All the while, alternative modes of expression have challenged strict polarities.

Consider the opposition of roman and italic. In Western typography, italic type styles are typically viewed as secondary to the roman norm. In semiotics (the theory of signs), this kind of relationship is called marked and unmarked. The unmarked category is the neutral default (roman), while the marked category stands out as an exception (italic). This opposition has not always existed in typography. During the first century of metal type, roman and italic flourished as separate dialects, unbound by any binary relationship. Early typefaces were based on handwriting styles, each with different purposes and properties. The printer Aldus Manutius worked in the busy commercial city of Venice at the turn of the fifteenth century. He published many beautiful books, including low-cost, small-scale volumes, using an italic typeface designed by Francesco Griffo. These early italics were inspired by casual, cursive scripts that working scribes could write quickly and inexpensively. Griffo’s italic lacked uppercase letters, so roman capitals were inserted where needed. Tall and fluid, Griffo’s italics conserved space, making them a cheaper alternative to the romans used in more deluxe printed books. By the early sixteenth century, roman text became the norm in many regions, while italics were reserved for emphasis. Type families created by Claude Garamond and other type founders included italics whose x-heights and line weights conformed to the dominant roman style. The typefaces of this era also featured uppercase and lowercase characters in matching styles. These relationships—roman/ italic and uppercase/lowercase—became standard components of typography. What is an italic letterform, anyway? Is it a mere shadow of its roman master, or does it assert its own unique personality? The italic alphabets of Garamond and Caslon are quite distinct from their roman partners, despite having strong family ties. Their strokes are more fluid and relaxed, with lilting serifs leading one letter to the next, while their single-story a’s and g’s are designed to comfortably accommodate the letters’ narrow proportions and snug spacing. Sloped or slanted romans take their cues from a roman template. These italic forms are made by tilting the basic roman character, rather than designing a unique yet sympathetic partner. In many sans serif type families, the italic style is called oblique, meaning slanted. Software tools such as Photoshop and InDesign can add a slope to any letter—usually with awkward results. Designers have multiple tools for marking (or not marking) differences. From commercial printers to champions of the avant-garde, designers have questioned canonical binaries within typography and the broader culture. Serif and sans serif typefaces exist on a spectrum. Letters with horizontal stress are bucking the patriarchy of the vertical. Typefaces built with inconsistent parts have been championed by activists and people with disabilities. Typography’s strongest binary is black versus white. Many medieval books are multicolor productions, written on vellum writing surfaces that aren’t stark white. According to Jonathan Senchyne, the black/white opposition coincides with the rise of printing. Image and text both expressed this polarity. Wood engravings were produced with type-high blocks, manufactured so that they could print simultaneously with text. Engravings were printed in pure tones of ink—usually black. Senchyne writes that ultrawhite paper became the ideal printing surface in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While some printers rebelled against the brilliant tones and hard finishes of state-of-theart paper manufacturing in favor of softer shades and overall tactility, white paper dominated as a standard of quality. White paper was often compared to a virginal White woman, a pure blank page awaiting the writer’s mark. Printers’ obsession with white paper reinforced White society’s fierce devotion to the Black/White racial binary. The supposed purity of the White race could not withstand a single drop of “Black” blood, just as white paper had to be rigorously defended against smudges of wayward ink. The eighteenth-century English printer and type founder John Baskerville engineered his own inks and his own paper in order to maximize the contrast between black and white. Although some critics condemned the glittering brilliance of Baskerville’s work, the hunger for contrast continued unabated. The typefaces created by Firmin Didot and Giambattista Bodoni at the turn of the nineteenth century have extreme contrast between thin and thick strokes, enhancing the difference between black ink and white paper. Bodoni’s Manuale Tipografico (1818) describes typography as a system of interchangeable parts: “Analyzing the alphabet of any language, one not only can find similar lines in many different letters, but will also find that all of them can be formed with a small number of identical parts.” Bodoni aimed to eliminate subtle gradations of form in favor of “marking the differences which are required in a most outstanding way.” Despite Bodoni’s own classical, austere sensibility, his modular approach helped open the profusion of inventive display types created for the burgeoning advertising industry in the nineteenth century. The opposition between serif and sans serif is another binary structure. Typefaces with blunt terminations—now called sans serif—began appearing in the early nineteenth century. Type designers tricked out the alphabet with deep shadows and fancy scrollwork. Serifs ceased to be staid and dignified finishing details; they shed their inhibitions to become expressive elements in their own right. Created for advertising and commercial signs, these display typefaces flaunted curly-topped serifs, chunky slabs, or no serifs at all. These variations were not polar opposites so much as scrappy siblings cohabiting typography’s strange new reality. In the twentieth century, the sans/serif binary took on the weight of ideology. Jan Tschichold, evangelist for rational, machine-age typography, wrote in 1928, “Among all the types that are available, the so-called ‘Grotesque’ (sans serif) or ‘block letter’ (‘skeleton letters’ would be a better name) is the only one in spiritual accordance with our time....Sans serif is absolutely and always better.” Tschichold struggled to find the right terminology. The letters he idealized not only lacked serifs but have uniform line weights as well. His phrase “skeleton letters” describes the monoline, serif-free typefaces that became the backbone of modernist graphic design. (Slicing the serifs off of Bodoni is not what Tschichold had in mind.) Yet just as italics take multiple forms of expression, the serif is an elusive thing. Typographer John Berry’s taxonomy of letter endings suggests that if a serif can be so many things—from a spiky spur to a massive, blocky slab—it might not be a thing at all. Letters that lack serifs also take many different forms. Stems and strokes that swell, bend, pucker, or flair resist neat binary categories. Attacking the uppercase/lowercase binary, Bauhaus master Herbert Bayer sought to eliminate capital letters and thus reduce the alphabet to its skeletal essence. He argued that unicase fonts require fewer characters, are easier to learn, and would lower the cost of printing. Furthermore, a lowercase alphabet would challenge social hierarchy—all letters would now be equal. Although the bid to eliminate capital letters failed to become a standard in the West, designers today use lowercase letters in posters, ads, branding, and publications to signify a relaxed, conversational tone. Writer bell hooks spells her name in lowercase to question patriarchal naming systems. Our book Extra Bold uses lowercase chapter titles and headings to undercut the power-based concept of typographic hierarchy. Because of their kingly status, capital letters can signal dignity and importance. In the 1920s, Civil Rights leader and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois pressed editors and publishers to spell the word Negro with a capital N in order to confer respect on an oppressed people. Likewise, many publications today capitalize the word Black to show respect for Black identity. What about the word white? Historian Nell Irvin Painter advocates capitalizing Black, White, and Brown when referring to race or ethnicity. Capitalizing the word White racializes this ostensibly neutral, invisible category. (Some writers prefer to write white in lowercase to avoid giving credence to White nationalism.) Painter asserts, “One way of remaking race is through spelling—using or not using capital letters. A more potent way, of course, is through behavior.”