OLD AND BUSTED: Charles Manson interpreted the songs on the Beatles’ “White Album” as being a call for a titanic race war.
The New Hotness? Columbia professor wins award for book on ‘white paint’ being racist.
Among the many woke winners of this year’s prestigious National Book Awards is a black Columbia University professor whose screed attacks “white paint” as racist.
Professor Wendy Walters’ new book, “A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint,” claims that white paint is not the “neutral” architectural design element that it initially appears to be.
Instead, she “interrogates all that we have taken for granted about the substance that colors, or fails to color, the structures and objects that surround us—and what the collective impulse toward white paint can tell us about culture, politics, and individual desire,” the publisher’s description states, in part.
The idea for the book originated with the Ivy League professor’s “genuine and visceral dislike of white paint – a feeling that is at times overwhelming,” she explained in a 2021 video for Creative Capital Foundation on YouTube.
But Walters pushed back on the idea that her emotional response is “possibly irrational.”
“As I tried to understand why my response to white paint was so strong, I discovered numerous examples of the way that it figured into systems of erasure, exclusion, violence, and the masking of power in the social and natural world,” she said in the video.
Most of the examples she gave linked white paint to racism.
In one, white supremacists splattered white paint outside the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas in 2018, and, in another, white paint was used to vandalize a 100th anniversary memorial gallery to the Tulsa race massacre in 2021.
She also mentioned a rainbow crosswalk for “LGBTQIA+ persons” in New Brunswick, Canada being painted over with white paint in an “act of intolerance.”
“I hope to encourage the reader to think about how practices of decoration and adornment might allude to hidden narratives of power, whether or not they recognize them as being so,” she said in the video.
Haven’t we been here before though? In December of 2023, Red State’s Mike Miller wrote: ‘Interior Race Theory:’ Your Home Is Likely ‘Racist,’ White People.
According to interior designer Jacquelyn Ogorchukwu Iyamah, people can creatively resist “structures of domination in their homes by challenging themselves to think about the various ways that politics are embedded into the built environment and encouraging more ‘racial wellness’ within the spaces they create” — particularly concerning the objects they display.
Iyamah also warns that people of color shouldn’t emulate white people in the interior design of their homes.
* * * * * * * * *
The Use of the Color White
You knew we’d get around to this, right?
In addition to the unforgivable sin of decorating a home with “racist objects” like “mammy jars, colonial busts, war memorabilia, and Confederate flags,” Iyamah argues that the use of white paint is just as “racist.”
The use of the color white has been weaponized to symbolize purity…. There’s [sic] a lot of ways that this theory can deconstruct conservative values that really align with whiteness.
So there you have it. Before you buy that next can of white paint to, say, repaint your kitchen, remember: the color white has been “weaponized to symbolize purity.”
Not to mention, weaponized to attack the socialist founders of modern architecture, who were obsessed with white on white buildings for the sake of minimalism. I don’t think they were intending their work to be coded as white supremacism, but given their ideological leanings in the 1930s and ’40s, perhaps Walters and Iyamah are on to something. From Bauhaus to David Duke’s House?
Or, as Northern Barbarian tweets, “Just when you think they couldn’t get weirder.”