Quotes About Whiteness

Love is life's snow. It falls deepest and softest into the gashes left by the fight - whiter and purer than snow itself.

The core of critical race theory (CRT) lies in the propositions that racism is ordinary and permanent; that whiteness and property coincide; that history is told only by dominant groups, and requires a counternarrative; and that color-blindness is a myth, and that the notion of equality of rights is itself a reflection of color hierarchy.

Making whiteness American culture, the nation has forgone other possibilities. The hybridity that could have been our greatest strength has been made into a means of playing across the color line, with its rotting distance of voyeurism and partisanship, a confirmation of social and psychological division.

The implication of "making whiteness," of course, is that whiteness can be unmade, so that other, more democratic grounds of coherence can be established and lived.

Because white guilt is a vacuum of moral authority, it makes the moral authority of whites and the legitimacy of American institutions contingent on proving a negative: that they are not racist. The great power of white guilt comes from the fact that it functions by stigma, like racism itself. Whites and American institutions are stigmatized as racist until they prove otherwise.

The hottest rage of those grieving their whiteness is reserved not for the members of another race but for the members of another social class.

Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn't been totaled or repossessed.

Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn't been totaled or repossessed. - Miss Annie, pg. 424

Even though Jesus took on flesh for my sake, whiteness prevents me from knowing how to live in my own skin.

El alma humana tiene una gran necesidad de blancura. Desde que lo blanco se oscurece, la desdicha empieza. La práctica y conciencia de todas las virtudes, la posesión de las mejores cualidades, la arrogancia de los más nobles sacrificios no bastan a consolar el alma de un solo extravío.

She was white, perhaps too white. Her eyes, which were almost always cast down, when she raised them testified to the purest of souls, and when she smiled, revealing her small, white teeth, one might be tempted to say that a rose is merely a plant, and ivory just an elephant's tusk.

Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity").

The relevant question is not whether all Whites are racist but how we can move more White people from a position of active or passive racism to one of active antiracism.

In order to prevent chronic discomfort, Whites may learn not to notice. But in not noticing, one loses opportunities for greater insight into oneself and one's experience. A significant dimension of who one is in the world, one's Whiteness, remains uninvestigated and perceptions of daily experience are routinely distorted. Privilege goes unnoticed, and all but the most blatant acts of racial bigotry are ignored. Not noticing requires energy.

But the pinkness and whiteness of underskirts and camisoles, the frilliness of foundation garments, the rustle about the bustle and the fuss about the bust.

Noon is a disguise of whiteness put on by the eternal Night behind it.

If you are white, you have an obligation to at least understand where the concept of whiteness comes from and to decide how you will proceed with that knowledge. I hope your journey will include an intentional choice to acquire dexterity.

As chaste as unsunned snow.

I love snow, snow, and all the forms of radiant frost.

When liberal whites fail to understand how they can and/or do embody white supremacist values and beliefs even though they may not embrace racism as prejudice or domination (especially domination that involves coercive control), they cannot recognize the ways their actions support and affirm the very structure of racist domination and oppression that they wish to see eradicated.

Any black person who clings to the misguided notion that white people represent the embodiment of all that is evil and black people all that is good remains wedded to the very logic of Western metaphysical dualism that is the heart of racist binary thinking. Such thinking is not liberatory. Like the racist educational ideology it mirrors and imitates, it invites a closing of the mind.

Whether they are able to enact it as lived practice or not, many white folks active in anti-racist struggle today are able to acknowledge that all whites (as well as everyone else within white supremacist culture) have learned to overvalue "whiteness" even as they simultaneously learn to devalue blackness.

Often their rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of sameness even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think.

The we evoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves that negates that there is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness.