Quotes About Whiteness

What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears.

For a lot of white people, just suggesting that being white has meaning will trigger a deep, defensive response. And that defensiveness serves to maintain both our comfort and our positions in a racially inequitable society from which we benefit.

Nobody seemed to want to venture out into the naked aura beyond the trees where the grass had been bleached to bone whiteness beneath the moon's colourless radiance.

Shit now is the color white folks are afraid of. Shit is the presence of death, not some abstract-arty character with a scythe but the stiff and rotting corpse inside the whiteman's warm and private own asshole, which is getting pretty intimate. That's what the toilet is for. You see many brown toilets? Nope, toilet's the color of gravestones, classical columns of mausoleums, that white emblems the very emblem of Odorless and Official death.

Whiteness of moonlight builds a house that is not there

White culture is not marked by its uniquely creative and enriching social contributions. Rather, it is distinguished by its ability to promote the sanctity of whiteness by devaluing that which is non-White.

The strange white world lay stroked by silence. No birds sang. The garden was no longer there, in this forested land. Nor were the out-buildings nor the old crumbling walls. There lay only a narrow clearing round the house now, hummocked with unbroken snowdrifts, before the trees began, with a narrow path leading away.

I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.

Whiteness is a dangerous concept. It is not about skin color. It is not even about race. It is about the self-delusion used to justify white supremacy. It is about using moral rhetoric to defend exploitation, racism, mass murder, reigns of terror, and the crimes of empire.

Hardly any aspect of my life, from where I had lived to my education to my employment history to my friendships, had been free from the taint of racial inequity, from racism, from whiteness. My racial identity had shaped me from the womb forward. I had not been in control of my own narrative. It wasn't just race that was a social construct. So was I.

If whiteness is an illusion, on what else can a poor man without prospects pride himself?

Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. Or so our writers seem to say.

I am aware of how whiteness matures and ascends the throne of universalism by maintaining its powers to describe and enforce its descriptions.

But as sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom observed, "Whiteness defends itself. Against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, and against its own laws and customs.

I loved a maid as white as winter, with moonglow in her hair.

What became clear to me though, is that my white colleague had not experienced racialized trauma. My colleague was threatened because of his exercise of courageous speech. But his whiteness remained unmarked. The objective here is not to judge who suffered more, me or my white colleague. Rather it is important to recognize the specifically white racist hatred that I encountered. How my Black body was assaulted. My white colleague was threatened, but his whiteness was not under attack.

I wandered out like a haggard ghost, and there she was, Frisco - long, bleak streets with trolley wires all shrouded in fog and whiteness. I stumbled around a few blocks. Weird bums (Mission and Third) asked me for dimes in the dawn.

In the pit of red You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness But the jewel you lost was blue.

Anni and Josef Albers's house was the whitest place imaginable.

The night was serene. Not a cloud was in the zenith. What mattered is that the earth was red, the moon retained her whiteness. Such is the indifference of heaven.

White" is seen as the default, the absence of race. ...Whiteness, then, is shrouded in silence. To speak about it openly is to break a taboo.

Whiteness has already recruited us to become their junior partners in genocidal wars; conscripted us to be antiblack and colorist; to work for, and even head, corporations that scythe off immigrant jobs like heads of wheat. Conscription is every day and unconscious. It is the default way of life among those of us who live in relative comfort, unless we make an effort to choose otherwise.

Their delusion is also tacit in the community heard defensive retort to Black Lives Matter that "all lives matter." Rather than being inclusive, "all" is a walled-off pronoun, a defensive measure to "not make it about race" so that the invisible hegemony of whiteness can continue unchallenged.

The takeaway from the crowd-pleasing opening scene in the novel and film Crazy Rich Asians is the following: if you discriminate against us, we'll make more money than you and buy your fancy hotel that wouldn't let us in. Capitalism as retribution for racism. But isn't that how whiteness recruits us? Whether it's through retribution or indebtedness, who are we when we become better than them in a system that destroyed us?