Quotes About Whiteness

The history of representations of Cleopatra provides one of the clearest instances of the conviction that whiteness is the pinnacle of human beauty. Cleopatra became a byword for feminine beauty in European culture, but in the process she had to be represented as white. As

Yet the lure of the ideal is also, often imperceptibly, haunted by misgiving, even anxiety. Not only is whiteness as absence impossible, it is not wholly desirable. To relinquish dirt and stains, corporeality and thingness, is also to relinquish both the pleasures of the flesh and the reproduction upon which whiteness as racial power depends. To be nothing is to be dead, something

Its whiteness carried with it a certain kind of elegance, the beauty of maturity and experience, symbol of a long life lived wisely and productively.

As chaste as unsunn'd snow.

That evening was the evening of the full moon. The garden was an enchanted place where all the flowers seemed white. The lilies, the daphnes, the orange-blossom, the white stocks, the white pinks, the white roses—you could see these as plainly as in the day-time; but the coloured flowers existed only as fragrance.

There is a lack of understanding on white people's part that it is not just a question of their own individual prejudice or lack of it, but of how racism works in a systematic and structural form to disadvantage ethnic minorities. And there is a taken-for-granted lens and experience of whiteness which makes for ignorance and blindness to the discrimination that ethnic minorities suffer in white-dominated societies.

In other words, whiteness is relational, and regarded as the norm unless non-whites are encountered and their status as co-citizens acknowledged.

This is the paradox of being white and 'seeing white', but being to all intents and purposes 'invisible' or, more appropriately, as Frankenberg, Garner, and other sociologists of 'whiteness' have suggested, 'unmarked'. In Western societies

She remarks, in particular, how white people simply fail to understand how they might be complicit, unwittingly, in shoring up structures of white dominance.

Por la ventana, la interminable Siberia, totalmente blanca de invierno, prisión ideal debido a su inmensidad. Los que huyen mueren perdidos en un exceso de espacio. Es

My kitchen is not a place to live in. I made it white so I can tell instantly if it's not clean-and I like it clean enough to be able to eat off the floors-or the tables, for that matter.

It is too heavy, says the canvas. You lack restraint. I was sleeping in whiteness, drifts of snow, and you woke me and told me your dream, my blank face upturned, listening. You came to me while we were sleeping, we were both sleeping, and you asked me to hold this for you. I am holding this for you.

God had bestowed on him a snowy whiteness of complexion and an enviable determination.

one of the greatest barriers to race talk for many White Americans: the invisibility of their Whiteness (Bell, 2003; Helms, 1992; Spanierman, Poteat, Beer, & Armstrong, 2006; Tatum, 1992; Todd & Abrams, 2011).

Strangely enough, Whiteness is most visible when it is denied, evokes puzzlement/negative reactions, and is equated with normalcy.

most people seldom think about the air that surrounds them, and how it provides an essential life-giving ingredient, oxygen. We take it for granted because it is plentiful in our everyday lives; only when we are deprived of it, does it suddenly become frighteningly apparent. Whiteness is transparent precisely because of its everyday occurrence, its institutionalized normative features in U.S. culture, and because Whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, average, and ideal.

if Whiteness, as unearned privilege and advantage, is predicated on White supremacy and the oppression of people of color and if Whites benefit from it, then a frightening conclusion must be drawn: Whites have a stake in racism and to be White is to benefit from racism (Wise, 2002). Little wonder then that race talk is threatening and that many Whites avoid it in order not to reach this conclusion.

The inability to see how the assumptions and biased practices exist in one's own beliefs and behaviors allows Whites to operate in a vacuum of naïveté and innocence that distances them from responsibility or the knowledge that their unawareness fosters complicity in the inequities of our society.

For White Americans, successful racial dialogues allow them to grasp the significance of what it means to be White, and how Whiteness with its accompanying invisible norms and standards are entrenched into their everyday lives. This racial awakening and the development of a nonracist identity is intimately linked to racial identity development (Helms, 1990, 1995; Sue, 1995, 2013; Tatum, 1992, 1997).

How wonderful to wander among virgin hills! I suppose whiteness is a symbol of purity (skin color being an exception) and how pure I found that world. As you've heard me say many times, the mountains are my life. Without them I am nothing. They are perhaps the only reality I know. They are my guru. If I am to learn anything in life, I will learn it there.

But there is always a November space after the leaves have fallen when she felt it was almost indecent to intrude on the woods…for their glory terrestrial had departed and their glory celestial of spirit and purity and whiteness had not yet come upon them.

The incident emphasizes once more that beauty is something to be found, rather than passively encountered, that it requires us to pick up on certain details, to identify the whiteness of a cotton dress, the reflection of the sea on the hull of a yacht, or the contrast between the color of a jockey's coat and his face.

For we fear not only the loss of our possessions, but the loss of our superiority and the loss of our whiteness. Some say it is true that crime is bad, but would this not be worse? Is it not better to hold what we have, and to pay the price of it with fear?

This renewed politics of otherness not only allowed entire categories of poor whites to develop a powerful sense of racial belonging, but also allowed entire categories of erstwhile nonwhite immigrants (the Irish are the most prominent example) to become white.