Quotes About Whiteness

And suddenly the cockpit of the Lancaster breasts the cloud tops, and there is the sky, vast and clear and brilliantly blue. The wisps of cloud that rush past you are so white that you can't believe you've ever seen true whiteness before.

At Tara in this fateful hour, I place all Heaven with its power, And the sun with its brightness, And the snow with its whiteness, And the fire with all the strength it hath, And the lightning with its rapid wrath, And the winds with their swiftness along their path, And the sea with its deepness, And the rocks with their steepness, And the earth with its starkness: All these I place, By God's almighty help and grace Between myself and the powers of darkness!

Even pearls are dark before the whiteness of his teeth.

What I discovered during my studies in Poe's and other early Americans' texts was the intellectual source of racial Whiteness. Here, in these pages, was the very fossil record of how this odd and illogical sickness formed. Here was the twisted mythic underpinnings of modern racial thought that could never before be dismantled because we were standing on them.

That is how they stay so white: by refusing to accept blemish or history. Whiteness isn't about being something, it is about being no thing, nothing, an erasure. Covering over the truth with layers of blank reality just as the snowstorm was now covering our tent...(225)

the major legislative achievements of the eugenics movement included a set of involuntary sterilization laws that targeted not immigrants or people of color, but poor "feebleminded" whites.

None of that matters now," said Twilight. "Look behind you." The Borribles did, and there, just a little beyond the rim of the bridge, they saw a halo of harsh whiteness reflected on the underneath of the dark sky. It was the beam of a car's headlights as it got into position on the north side of the bridge, the side the runaways had left only moments before.

The history of whiteness in America is one long scroll of affirmative action.

Working as a white ally is tough, but certainly not impossible. Learning to listen is a virtue that whiteness has often avoided. I asked him to engage, to adopt the vocabulary of empathy, to develop fluidity in the dialect of hope and the language of racial understanding. It

Maleness has functioned in our race much like whiteness has in the larger culture: its privileges have been rendered normal, its perspectives natural, its biases neutral, its ideas superior, its anger wholly justifiable, and its way of being the gift of God to the universe.

Whiteness is an advantage and privilege because you have made it so, not because the universe demands it.

One of the greatest privileges of whiteness is not to see color, not to see race, and not to pay a price for ignoring it, except, of course, when you're called on it.

The idolatry of whiteness and the cloak of innocence that shields it can only be quenched by love, but not merely, or even primarily, a private, personal notion of love, but a public expression of love that holds us all accountable. Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.

Yes, yes, I know many of you are proud to be Irish, or Italian, or Polish, or Jewish. And those ethnic groups are as real as any other groups with identifiable cultures, languages, and histories. But when your ancestors got to America, they endured a profound makeover. All of your polkas, or pubs, or pizzas, and more got tossed into a crucible of race where European ethnicities got pulverized into whiteness.

Whiteness has privilege and power connected to it, no matter how poor you are.

The soul is the form of the body, but not as the shape of a statue is formatio et terminatio materiae, for form does not exist apart from material. There is no whiteness without a white object. But the soul is not a form in this simple sense, and in particular, is not the shape of the material it informs. Therefore, the shape of a being does not affect the being's soul, for then something lower would inform something higher, which is impossible.

Whiteness has been, above all, a racial formation that presupposed and reproduced relations of inequality and domination between "whites" and their racial others.

In the second place, the term "Caucasian" as a designation for white people originates in concepts of beauty related to the white slave trade from eastern Europe, and whiteness remains embedded in visions of beauty found in art history and popular culture.

The historical role of classical music as the taken-for-granted high-cultural expression of Western civilization was built on a network of interlinked ideas that included masculinity, whiteness, greatness, national destiny, the colonial order, and a future understood as firmly grounded on the status quo.

The abolitionists study whiteness in order to abolish it—not to "reframe," or "redeem," or "deconstruct" it but to abolish it.

The forest was white in the snowfall, but still seemed to hold more secrets than she had ever thought possible.

Marse Compton hadn't aged but curdled like stagnant milk. His white arrogance had piled and thickened, casting its sour odor wherever he went.

Your teeth are like a flock of newly shorn sheep coming up from the washing; each has its twin, and not one of them is lost.

Your teeth are like a flock of sheep coming up from the washing; each has its twin, and not one of them is lost.