Change Category Link (link under posts) color

I’m trying to change the link color from the standard blue and purple just for the category links to be white with a black background.

I’ve had no luck on the template adding font tags and as you can see adding stuff to style.css with the whitelink attribute and putting on a span tag with the class around it.

Any suggestions?

Below is the coding I’m trying to use to make this happen and so far a no-go

CSS

a.whitelink:link {color: #FFFFFF; background: #000000; font-weight: bold;}
a.whitelink:active {color: #FFFFFF; background: #000000; font-weight: bold;}
a.whitelink:visited {color: #FFFFFF; background: #000000; font-weight: bold;}
a.whitelink:hover {color: #FFFFFF; background: #000000; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;}

Template code:

<span class=”whitelink”><?php the_category(‘, ‘) ?></span>