Throughout the book, I have largely chosen not to capitalize black or white. There is some equivocation about the style convention at the moment: some insist on capitalizing the word black, others do not. This moment in history does not permit equivocation about the facts. As Wesley Lowery notes, “racism is deadly real” but “race itself is a fiction.” Retaining the lowercase, following writers including Toni Morrison and Lowery, challenges how we legitimate race as a biological fact at a time when it is critical to do so. This book addresses how the construction of race required turning fictions into fact, with deadly consequences in American life. To capitalize black or white would undermine the very evidence I present in these pages.