Our normally correct Gazette seems to have joined the recently hatched national frenzy to further separate American citizens, editorially, by color, by referring to “Black” and “white” categories of citizenship (Gazette, Wednesday, Don’t restore racist housing discrimination).

One has to wonder what etymological authority, what linguistic guru, what philological wizard in the dictionary business has now decided that such inconsistency is required to further deconstruct the English language. Does this linguistic option represent “diversity” or “equity” in the now hopeless scramble to separate each of us from all the others by vocabulary alone, the two words that reveal the artificiality and inconsistency of the anti-discrimination industry?

We are now vexed in our identity-driven society with the endless quest to invent ways to describe ourselves as someone who somehow has a claim on everybody else. Where once the word “citizenship” was the unifying force in explaining who had what rights and protections under one common identity, we now have prostituted much of the English language to splinter society into irreconcilable political factions. If we are going to capitalize one ethnic color, wouldn’t it be editorially correct to capitalize all others? Whitney Galbraith

Colorado Springs