Kwame Anthony Appiah examines the matter of using Black over black and outlines an interesting case for also needing to use White instead of white.
What about Visconti’s argument that white people don’t think of themselves as white people? If he were right—and he isn’t—we could still ask: Should it be that way? It’s true that white people have the luxury of not thinking of themselves as white when they’re in all-white settings; the less that’s the norm, the less they can think of race as something that only other people have—the way talk of “ethnic” food suggests that ethnicity is a property only “ethnics” have.
And so the way the Seattle Times style guide treats whiteness as an objective feature of populations is unsettling. “People of light-colored skin, especially of European descent”: the equivocal force of “especially” leaves unclear whether white could apply, say, to a pale-skinned Japanese person. We know better only because we have a prior notion of who counts as white, a prior sense of white people as an identity group. By treating Black as a name and white as a fact, the style guide would exempt white people from history—a rather troubling history at that.