Whiteness Quotes

• The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul is not likely to lose it in any other.

  Alexander Smith

  Men, Soul, World

  Alexander Smith (1863). “Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country”, p.13

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• Even pearls are dark before the whiteness of his teeth.

  Bill Vaughan

  Funny, Dark, Teeth

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• There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man's shirt on its morning run.

  Gwendolyn Brooks

  Running, Morning, Men

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• The white men of the South had better make up their minds that the blacks will remain in the South just as long as corn will tassel and cotton will bloom into whiteness.

  Timothy Thomas Fortune

  Men, White Man, Long

  Timothy Thomas Fortune, Seth Moglen (2007). “Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South”, Simon and Schuster

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• If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness - just a drop of it - does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.

  Eric Liu

  Skin Tone, America, Color

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• Our holiness is an effect, not a cause; so long as our eyes are on our own personal whiteness as an end in itself, the thing breaks down.

  Charles Simeon

  Eye, Long, Holiness

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• Early impressions are hard to eradicate from the mind. When once wool has been dyed purple, who can restore it to its previous whiteness?

  St. Jerome

  Purple, Mind, Wool

  St. Jerome (2012). “The Sacred Writings of Saint Jerome (Annotated Edition)”, p.399, Jazzybee Verlag

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• Whiteness is ownership of the earth.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Earth, Ownership

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• Whiteness is not a culture . . . Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position . . . . Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist, and the white skin would have no more social significance than big feet

  Noel Ignatiev

  Race, White, Feet

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• White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn't brought up to hate. But hate isn't the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness - that primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.

  Adrienne Rich

  Hate, Passion, White

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• If you know the history of the whole concept of whiteness if you know the history of the whole concept of the white race, where it came from and for what reason you know that it was a trick, and it's worked brilliantly. You see, prior to the mid to late 1600s, in the colonies of what would become the United States, there was no such thing as the white race. Those of us of European descent did not refer to ourselves by that term really ever before then.

  Tim Wise

  White, Race, United States

  "The Pathology of Privilege: Racism". Speach produced by Media Education Foundation, 2008.

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• The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race.

  Noel Ignatiev

  Keys, Race, White

  Noel Ignatiev, John Garvey (2014). “Race Traitor”, p.10, Routledge

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• I dissolved, so white, so unapproachable, amid my white flame, in the whiteness of moonlight

  Giannis Ritsos

  Flames, White, Moonlight

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• Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.

  Noel Ignatiev

  Loyalty, Humanity, Treason

  "When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories". Book by Bernestine Singley, harvardmagazine.com. 2002.

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• The translation process becomes a highly subjective thing - turning reds and blues into black-and-whiteness. It's really bizarre for me.

  Robert Longo

  Black, Bizarre, Process

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Whiteness in a racist, corporate-controlled society is like having the image of an American Express Cardstamped on one's face: immediately you are “universally accepted.”

  Manning Marable

  Racist, Faces, Accepted

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• It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used.

  Arundhati Roy

  Believe, Nuclear, Weapons

  Arundhati Roy (2016). “The End of Imagination”, p.49, Haymarket Books

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• 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.

  Tim Wise

  Race, Racism, Identity

  Tim Wise (2013). “White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son”, p.8, Soft Skull Press

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• The Nazis played the same games against Jews that today’s left plays against 'Eurocentrism,' 'whiteness,' and 'logocentrism.' When you hear a campus radical denounce 'white logic' or 'male logic,' she is standing on the shoulders of a Nazi who denounced 'Jewish logic' and the 'Hebrew disease'...The white man is the Jew of liberal fascism.

  Jonah

  Men, White, Games

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• My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others' agony. If I could peel myself inside out I would be glad. If I could become part of the oppressed I would be free.

  Robin Morgan

  Freedom, Agony, White

  Robin Morgan (2014). “The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism”, p.183, Open Road Media

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• The rice grain suffers under the blow of the pestle. But admire its whiteness once the order is over. So it is with men and the world we live in. To be a man one must suffer the blows of misfortune.

  Ho Chi Minh

  Blow, Men, Order

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• People feared snowstorms once. Hazel read about this all the time. Pioneers opened their front doors and saw they'd been entombed in snow overnight. They walked across malevolent swirling whiteness and did not know if they would survive. Nature can destroy us in a blink. We live on only at its pleasure. That was what looking at the witch was like.

  Anne Ursu

  Doors, People, Snow

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• 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.

  Bell Hooks

  Believe, Emotional, Thinking

  bell hooks (2014). “Black Looks: Race and Representation”, p.167, Routledge

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• I understood that every flower created by Him is beautiful, that the brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would no longer be enamelled with lovely hues. And so it is in the world of souls, Our lord's living garden.

  Therese of Lisieux

  Beautiful, Sweet, Flower

  Saint Therese of Lisieux (2007). “The Story of the Soul”, p.26, Cosimo, Inc.

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

  Earle Birney

  Time, Bears, Cold

  Earle Birney (2014). “The Essential Earle Birney”, p.52, The Porcupine's Quill

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