A reader of Arny’s Sitting in the Fire, recently asked about Chapter 3 which discusses rank. She wanted to know why Arny capitalized the names of many peoples, such as Aboriginal Australians, Latinos, Africans, Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, but did not capitalize whites?

The answer is that in the mid 1990’s, Arny was (and still is) trying to compensate for the overwhelming rank given to white people over others in many parts of the world. But the more complete answer is that compensating for rank, by lowering one’s status (e.g. from White to white)  is only the beginning of social action.  It is not sustainable, because in the grandest sense of deep democracy which includes all worlds, everyone has equal value.  Moreover, every experiential level has equal value, (even if we still occasionally emphasize Dreaming over consensus reality ).