Quotes About Whiteness

centering of whiteness, white tears, the racism of denying racism, hurt feelings, white supremacy performed as hurt feelings.30 She is told off, called out for calling them out, for complaining in the wrong way.

Whiteness can be reproduced in the spaces where it is supposedly being questioned. You even have to do the work of questioning the terms of their terms ("if you want to decolonize, we'll do it on our terms"). If you don't use their terms, or if you question their terms, what happens then? You might be dropped; you might be stopped. But the questions you raise are turned into questions about you.

Translation: happiness becomes proximity to whiteness. Camel Gupta (2014) notes how it is sometimes assumed that brown queers and trans folk are rescued from unhappy brown families by happy white queer and trans communities. We are not a rescue mission. But when you deviate, they celebrate. Even happy brown queers would become unhappy at this point.

The land seemed to luxuriate in its silence and its whiteness, knowing that the snow had rendered it more beautiful than before.

Snow not falling but flying sidewise, and sudden, not signaled by the slow curdling of clouds all day and a flake or two drifting downward, but rushing forward all at once as though sent for. (The blizzard of '36 had looked like that.) And filling up the world's concavities, pillowing up in the gloaming, making night light with its whiteness, and then falling still in every one's dreams, falling for pages and pages... ("Novelty")

The air crystallised in the image of a stained glass angel, stark black and white. Stepping from a hidden dimension, this apparition became flesh and blood: an immense, forbidding man with dark hair and waxen skin. The face, too angular to be handsome, radiated the solid conviction of a born leader. There was a mole on his left cheek, a black singularity against the whiteness.

Yo fui un soldado que durmió en el lecho de Cleopatra la reina. Su blancura y su mirada astral y omnipotente. Eso fue todo. I was a soldier who slept in the bed of Cleopatra, the Queen. Her paleness, her starry and omnipotent gaze. Nothing more.

Through the cold time she holds me with evergreen devotion she bears up my whiteness.

The winter street is a salt cave. The snow has stopped falling and it's very cold. The cold is spectacular, penetrating. The street has been silenced, a theatre of whiteness, drifts like frozen waves. Crystals glisten under the streetlights.

His face flushed for an instant. It lost the preternatural whiteness and he seemed a young man of twenty-four-with sharply defined and beautiful features and gaunt well-modeled cheeks.

If God really loved Indians, he would have made us white people.

This perspective further argues that whites often don't recognize these systemic inequalities and thus don't acknowledge the privileges they enjoy by the virtue of being white and blame the disadvantaged position of many minorities on their own poor choices and wayward values.

By lunchtime the valley was lightly coated, like a cake with confectioner's sugar...there was white fur on the antlers of the iron deer and on the melancholy boughs of the Norway spruce.

The possessive investment in whiteness can't be rectified by learning "how to be more antiracist." It requires a radical divestment in the project of whiteness and a redistribution of wealth and resources. It requires abolition, the abolition of the carceral world, the abolition of capitalism. What is required is a remaking of the social order, and nothing short of that is going to make a difference.

No, life ends and no, there is nothing elsewhere, and no question now of ever finding again that white speck lost in whiteness, to see if they still lie still in the stress of that storm, or of a worse storm, or in the black dark for good, or the great whiteness unchanging, and if not what they are doing.

It was a white pandemonium with the wrong past.

As always she was kitted out in the pristine pastels of baby clothes and her little plimsolls were so white my eyes ached. To look directly at them one would need a piece of cardboard with a hole in it, of the type used for viewing a solar eclipse.

The emptiness is so intense, that anything which enters it leaves a trace, something of it remains in space: in the silence, in the whiteness, nothingness becomes peopled, too.

It's not the cold that makes you sleep yourself to death in the Arctic, it's the smooth pallor of the landscape, and the desert has that same smooth pallor, though Arabic. It's the whiteness, the sameness of everything, that makes you fall asleep out of life, parched or frozen and so so comfortable when you finally let it roll over your mind, like a rolling-pin over dough.

Her eyes hurt with tears against the screaming blackness of the path and the shuddering whiteness of the trees, and she thought, with a clear intelligent picture of the words in her mind, burning, Now I am really afraid.

White hands of whiteness Wash the stars' faces, Till glitter, glitter, glit, goes their brightness Down to poor places.

I know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.

As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become other, the outsider whose experience and tradition is too alien to comprehend.

Lorde asks us to do the more difficult and radical work of imagining what our realities might look like if masculinity were not the ideal to which we aspire, if heterosexuality were not the ideal to which we aspire, if whiteness were not the ideal to which we aspire.