Quotes About Whiteness

There are a few if any public spaces where black folks can express fear of whiteness, be it engendered by rational or irrational states of mind. However, white fear of blackness gains a constant hearing.

The snow itself is lonely or, if you prefer, self-sufficient. There is no other time when the whole world seems composed of one thing and one thing only.

un día seco y duro y caluroso, un día de tanta luz que los cielos parecían blancos y no azules—

I turn a corner, I offered, just as someone ahead of me turns the next corner. I can't see what that person looks like. All I can make out is a flash of white coattails. But the whiteness of the coattails is indelibly etched in my consciousness. Ever get that feeling?

A sheet of white extends to the lone dark vertical of the elm tree in the centre ... It is too perfect, to inviolate ... The snow is graced with waves written by the wind, the elm raises crooked arms in sleeves of white.

The snowflakes came down like little bits of newspaper

Julie wanted to die of his own whiteness, to be drowned in the tide of his embarrassment on behalf of all uncool white people everywhere when they tried to be cool.

the way a drop of blue paint intensified whiteness.

For many Whites, this new awareness of the benefits of a racist system elicits considerable pain, often accompanied by feelings of anger and guilt. These uncomfortable emotions can hinder further discussion. We all like to think that we deserve the good things we have received and that others, too, get what they deserve. Social psychologists call this tendency a "belief in a just world."5 Racism directly contradicts such notions of justice.

Cultural racism—the cultural images and messages that affirm the assumed superiority of Whites and the assumed inferiority of people of color—is like smog in the air. Some days it is so thick it is visible, other times it is less apparent, but always, day in and day out, we are breathing it in.

Habría un hoyo negro de seis pies de profundidad en el duro suelo. Esa sombra se uniría con esta sombra, y el peculiar suelo amarillento de nuestra localidad sellaría la herida en la blancura, y otra nevada borraría la novedad en la tumba de Joan

Seeing the bed, the crimson and eboy and golden canopy looped up over it, the covers spilled about, and her whiteness glowing against them as she approached, Leopardo knew a moment's utter and uncomprehending horror.

Color is nothing, I do not even notice it, I know only one thing, which is the purity of my conscience and the whiteness of my soul.

De la partie la plus noire de mon âme, à travers la zone hachurée me monte ce désir d'être tout à coup blanc. Je ne veux pas être reconnu comme Noir, mais comme Blanc. Or [...] qui peut la faire, sinon la Blanche? En m'aimant, elle me prouve que je suis digne d'un amour blanc.

it's not whiteness itself that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness. Same goes if you swap whiteness out for other things-- fancy possessions for sure, pedigree, maybe youth too... we beat Them (and spare ourselves a lot of tedium and terror) by declining to worship.

It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.

What a beautiful and chaste-looking mouth! from floor to ceiling, lines, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane, glossy as bridal satins.

I have a dining room done in different shades of white, with white cushions embroidered in yellow silk: the effect is absolutely delightful and the room beautiful.

Everything was white around the childlike beauty of her face. "I'm so sorry, Denna," he whispered. "You will remember me?" "I will have nightmares the rest of my life." Her smile widened. "I'm glad." She seemed genuinely proud.

His original negative experiences with whiteness, reinforced by many related experiences of overt and implicit racism at school and in the community, stayed with him. The earliest relational experiences are the most powerful and enduring.

To Ishmael, the whale's indefinite whiteness' shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation. [It's] a color-less, all-color of atheism from which we shrink.

It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught.

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows - a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?