Whiteness Quotes - Page 3

• Whiteness allows the architectural ideas to be understood most clearly - the difference between opacity and transparency, solid and void, structure and surface. These things are more perceptible in a white environment. They have a greater clarity.

  Richard Meier

  Ideas, White, Differences

  Source: www.architecturaldigest.com

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• To challenge norms, presuppositions, practices in communities across this country - where the unconscious valorization and celebration of whiteness and conscious resistance to trying to grapple with black and brown and other peoples of color's ideas and identities - makes a huge difference.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Country, Ideas, Differences

  "Michael Eric Dyson Wants White People to Step Up and Actually Do Something About Racism". Interview With Will Greenberg, www.motherjones.com. January 18, 2017.

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• At Tara in this fateful hour, I place all Heaven with its power, And the sun with its brightness, And the snow with its whiteness, And the fire with all the strength it hath, And the lightning with its rapid wrath, And the winds with their swiftness along their path, And the sea with its deepness, And the rocks with their steepness, And the earth with its starkness: All these I place, By God's almighty help and grace Between myself and the powers of darkness!

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Fire, Wrath, Rocks

  FaceBook post by Madeleine L'Engle from Nov 14, 2015

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• Not surprisingly, thinkers from groups for whom whiteness was and is a problem have taken the lead in studying whiteness in this way. Such study began with slave folktales and American Indian stories of contact with whites.

  David Roediger

  Taken, Groups, Stories

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• As I wrote Working toward Whiteness, I came to see one historic task on the New Deal - and one in which it succeeded - as the fostering of fuller U.S. citizenship among immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and their kids. But this very achievement separated poorer and often despised immigrant workers from Europe and workers of color in unprecedented ways.

  David Roediger

  Kids, Color, Europe

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• For radical white writers wishing to forge interracial movements of poor and working people, whiteness has also long been a problem, with Alexander Saxton and Ted Allen making especially full efforts to understand whiteness in order to disillusion whites unable to see past the value of their own skins.

  David Roediger

  Past, Order, White

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• You & I, Love, together we ratify the silence,
  while the sea destroys its perpetual statues,
  collapses its towers of wild speed and whiteness:
  because in the weavings of those invisible fabrics,
  galloping water, incessant sand,
  we make the only permanent tenderness.

  Pablo Neruda

  Famous Love, Sea, Water

  Pablo Neruda (2015). “The Poetry of Pablo Neruda”, p.512, Macmillan

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• Like many white liberals, Ken sees the whiteness of his social life as more an accident of circumstance than a choice. He would welcome greater diversity in the neighbourhood. However, he does not consciously do enough work either in his social life or in the larger community to make that diversity possible.

  Bell Hooks

  White, Diversity, Choices

  bell hooks (2013). “Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope”, p.55, Routledge

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• Within the model minority rhetoric, Asian Americans are represented as “good” minorities and African Americans are represented as “bad” minorities. Here, the achievements of Asian Americans are used to discipline African Americans. As model minorities, Asian Americans achieved the status of “honorary Whites”. Again it is important to point out that the honorary whiteness of Asian Americans was granted at the expense of Blacks. It is also significant that as “honorary Whites,” Asian Americans do not have the actual privileges associated with “real” whiteness.

  Jennifer Lee

  Real, Discipline, Achievement

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• We are nearer neighbors to ourselves than the whiteness of snow or the weight of stones are to us: if man does not know himself, how should he know his functions and powers?

  Michel de Montaigne

  Men, Snow, Doe

  Michel de Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Carew Hazlitt (1910). “Essays of Montaigne, tr. by C. Cotton; rev. by W. C. Hazlett [!”

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• Like sheaves of corn it gathers you unto itself. It threshes you to make you naked. It sifts you to free you from your husks. It grinds you to whiteness. It kneads you until you are pliant. And then it assigns you to its sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast. All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's Heart.

  Khalil Gibran

  Heart, Fire, Secret

  Khalil Gibran, “Love”

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• In a snowfall that covers the winter grass a white heron uses his own whiteness to disappear.

  Dogen

  Winter, White, Use

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• That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.

  John Milton

  Evil, Promise, Vices

  1644 Areopagitica: a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing.

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• I had wondered for a long time why God had preferences and why all souls did not receive an equal amount of grace [...] Jesus saw fit to enlighten me about this mystery. He set the book of nature before me and I saw that all the flowers He has created are lovely. The splendor of the rose and whiteness of the lily do not rob the little violet of its scent nor the daisy of its simple charm. I realized that if every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness and there would be no wild flowers to make the meadows gay.

  Therese of Lisieux

  Jesus, Spring, Flower

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• I don't think that the "freedom movement" is a racist movement as such. But it's a virulent example of identity politics. "Whiteness" is part of the identity, but not the most important part.

  Hendrik Hertzberg

  Identity Politics, Important, Example

  Source: www.newyorker.com

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• If half-black Barack Obama had decided years ago to call himself white - which his genes certainly entitled him to do - his story would have carried very different meaning. If millions of part-black people had followed him into whiteness, then the N.A.A.C.P. would be in true crisis.

  Eric Liu

  Years, White, People

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• no one who has seen an angel ever mistakes it for a ghost. Angels are remarkable for their warmth and light, and all who see them speak in awe of their irridescent and refulgent light, of brilliant colors, or else of the unbearable whiteness of their being. You are flooded with laughter, happiness.

  Sophy Burnham

  Laughter, Mistake, Angel

  Sophy Burnham (2011). “A Book of Angels: Reflections on Angels Past and Present, and True Stories of How They Touch Our L ives”, p.35, Penguin

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• The hare grows old as she plays in the sun
  And gazes around her with eyes of brightness;
  Before the swift things that she dreamed of were done
  She limps along in an aged whiteness.

  William Butler Yeats

  Eye, Play, Age

  William Butler Yeats (2015). “When You Are Old: Early Poems, Plays, and Fairy Tales”, p.40, Penguin

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• ...the global surface albedo [surface whiteness] and greenhouse gas changes account for practically the entire global climate change.

  James Hansen

  Energy, Climate, Environment

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• Faded the flower and all its budded charms,Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise!Vanishd unseasonably

  John Keats

  War, Flower, Eye

  John Keats, Jack Stillinger (1982). “Complete Poems”, p.374, Harvard University Press

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• We studied our angels for a few moments more, looking at where we had lain side by side in that sweet, quiet moment. I wished what I’d said was true, that we had truly left our mark on the mountain. But I knew that after the next snowfall, our angels would disappear into the whiteness and be nothing more than a memory.

  Richelle Mead

  Sweet, Memories, Angel

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• When I go to one of those singles dating parties I believe myself to be a bowl of fruit. When I talk to potential dates, I judge them by the smile in their lips, their smoothness of speech, and the whiteness of teeth; then I offer them the appropriate fruit, which is usually a lemon.

  Amanda Holden

  Party, Believe, Judging

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• For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.” — Virginia Woolf, The Waves

  Virginia Woolf

  Pain, Virginia, Blood

  Virginia Woolf (2005). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.763, Wordsworth Editions

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• I look at my four boys, who are the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Children, Boys, Dust

  Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.435, Faber & Faber

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• We flew throughout the summer and fall and the start of winter. At first the whiteness gave way to the green of summer, and then gold covered the fields and forests, and then the whiteness again.

  Anatoly Berezovoy

  Summer, Fall, Winter

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