This book raised two notable stylistic challenges. The first was whether to capitalize black in the frequent references to Black people. Many consider capitalization the new norm. And some have argued that the failure to capitalize Black is a slight that sensitive writers will avoid. But people are plainly divided. My daughter observes that her Black professors uniformly capitalize Black and her white professors generally use the traditional lowercase form. In many contexts, including my textbook and in the law-review article that is the foundation for this book, I have capitalized references to Black people and Black concerns. The publisher of this book, on the other hand, follows the traditional usage of referencing black people in the lowercase. After extensive conversations, we chose to use the lowercase form here primarily as a matter of aesthetics. This book makes frequent reference to black and white people within the same sentence or paragraph. Capitalizing Black but not white seemed visually distracting. Capitalizing both Black and White seemed equally distracting.

The second challenge was in sourcing. This book uses the sourcing style familiar to readers of law reviews and other legal texts. Notes at the end of paragraphs or a sequence of paragraphs will identify the sources for the quotations and the factual claims that appear above them. My goal was to provide sources for every significant factual claim and quotation in the book. That goal was in tension with the practical constraints of book publishing. Sourcing in the precise style of law reviews would have produced well over one hundred pages of endnotes. (The forty-thousand-word law-review article on which this book is based came in at more than six hundred source notes). The endnotes here run roughly thirty-five pages. In some instances, for the sake of efficiency, I have collapsed references for several paragraphs into a single endnote. This may require readers to proceed through several paragraphs to reach the endnote that provides the source. The text of an endnote may contain references to several sets of pages from a single source, and it might also list more than one source. The cited sources here will generally proceed in sequence. So, for example, an endnote following a sequence of three paragraphs indicating pages “3-4, 12, and 23-24” will designate the sources for those paragraphs in sequence.