Quotes About Whiteness

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.

I began to feel the whiteness in the room. If a neutral background color, say white, turned traffic-cone orange everywhere you went, you'd become chronically stressed and your mind would curdle like a slug in salt. That's how I felt. Only I had to pretend that I wasn't seeing traffic-cone orange everywhere.

The takeaway from the crowd-pleasing 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?

Their delusion is also tacit in the commonly 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.

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?

The white room is an interior to be made devoid of any specific sensualism emanated by objects. Ultimately it is classic white canvas expanded into three-dimensional space.

You are afraid that you have been here with me too long, and are not really white anymore. That's probably true, but you were never really white in the first place. Nobody is. Nobody has, even, ever wanted to be white, unless they are afraid of being black. But being black is nothing to be afraid of. I knew that before I met you, and I have learned it again, through you. Perhaps being white is not a conceivable condition, but a terrifying fantasy, a moral choice.

Goddamn, so this is what it means to have a leader You despise, the racists said when the president Was black and I'll be damned if I ain't saying it too. Is this a mandate for whiteness, virility, sovereignty, Stupidity, an idiot's threats & gangsta narcissisms threading Every shabby sentence his trumpet constructs?

The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness

I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.

Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque, A dull dark white against the day's pale white And abstract larches in the neutral light.

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing,--a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.

God made white people boring, then yawned and they all turned to stone.

The sky is gray and the big lake is duller and darker than the sky. In this dull light every color is accentuated, especially her skin. Her skin is white. The whiteness of her skin is like a thick, pale candle with a flame deep inside of it. In this light, the trees radiate greenness. Collected in: Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature by Lorraine Anderson

Michal too would catch one last glimpse of him in a dream. In 1958 she told a friend: I dreamt of Charles the other night. He was standing on a niche in a cathedral I could not identify. His garments were beyond whiteness & he looked very very grave & he looked & looked at me.1526

O Milky Way, sister in whitenessTo Canaan's rivers and the brightBodies of lovers drowned,Can we follow toilsomelyYour path to other nebulae?

You're also not white. You ever hear those heritage-not-hate types, that myth that the Irish were the first slaves in America? They're an interesting bunch. They're so close, you know, so close to understanding that whiteness is a thing that other people choose for you. People are white if whiteness is endowed upon them by the wider whiteness. It starts before birth and carries on after you're dead. And what whiteness gives, it can take away.

these pearls are orient, but they yield in whiteness to your teeth; the diamonds are brilliant, but they cannot match your eyes; and ever since I have taken up this wild trade, I have made a vow to prefer beauty to wealth.

and the thick, sugary covering of the snow...

For those of us called white, whiteness simply is. Whiteness becomes, for us, the unspoken, uninterrogated norm, taken for granted, much as water can be taken for granted by a fish.

No matter who was here first, whiteness and American identity have been joined at the hip for centuries; the sons and daughters of England, Ireland, Germany, Scotland and the like, have long been able to look in the mirror and see ourselves as the living embodiment of the American ideal. No matter their prior presence on these shores, the black, brown and red have forever and always had to lobby, petition, plead, scrape, fight and even die for the right to lay claim to that ideal as their own.

In high school, whites are sometimes asked to think about race, but rarely about whiteness.

He is fairer than the morning star, and whiter than the moon. For his body I would give my soul, and for his love I would surrender heaven.

No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since the world it opens is always a place formerly unsuspected. A world lost, a world unsuspected beckons to new places and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory of whiteness .