Everything white is a problem. Not just white people, who are obviously the worst, but also milk (“The Troubling Link Between Milk and Racism” George Washington University), white swans (“A Swan Has Been Accused of Attacking Students from Ethnic Minorities”) and now it’s time for white paint, all too ubiquitous in our racist society, to face its own long delayed racial reckoning.
The National Book Foundation has announced it’s doing its part to battle systemically racist paint by shortlisting “A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint” for its non-fiction award.
Written by Columbia University Associate Professor Wendy S. Walters, “A Dead White” delves into the hidden racism of our walls which are white in most homes instead of black because paint was invented by dead white racist heteropatriarchal capitalist slave owners.
According to Professor Walters, there are “black transwomen murdered with alarming targeted frequency”. When she saw the walls of her children’s school, she felt “apprehension” and wrote, “I could not stop thinking about the walls. I said to myself: They are so very white.”
A less sensitive person might assume that white is the most reflective color and painting walls white maximizes the effectiveness of natural and artificial light. But that person is probably a white racist who drinks milk, lives in a house with white walls and has never even thought about the targeted campaign of mass murder against “black transwomen” by Sherwin-Williams.
After trying to convey her “disapproval of the new school’s white walls” to another black parent, only to be dismissed out of hand by a fellow black woman, Professor Walters “had a sense of foreboding, as if some kind of betrayal was imminent”. She began to weep while picking up “breakfast sausage” from the supermarket and thought “white paint is getting me down.”
Predictably, Walters claims that “white paint represents something beyond itself”. That’s just the academic version of Charles Manson believing the Beatles were telling him to kill people. White paint isn’t a symbol, it’s a function: wokeness compresses everything into a symbolic conspiracy theory which reduces its followers to conspiratorial loonies and makes everyone into the enemy.
In true intersectional fashion, Professor Walters decided that “my problem stemmed from the intersection of color and material. White paint.” The demonization of white paint rests on the demonization of all white things as symbols for white people. The familiar narrative is that white symbolizes cleanliness and purity, but is really an absence created and maintained by white supremacy so that white people don’t have to experience the messiness of diversity.
We’re surrounded by white because white people run everything and keep other colors down.
The idea that white is neutral is itself white supremacy and so anything white comes to represent white supremacy. Dress that academic Marxism up in the faux lyricism of Alice Walker and you end up with senseless sentences like “the viewers’ ability to recognize blankness depends on how much enthusiasm they put towards the practice of not seeing evidence of human, animal, astronomical, or celestial presence.” White people, am I right?
Academia is now full of woke Pauls having their ‘Road to Racist Damascus’ moment by hyper-sensitizing themselves to racism and then waiting for that anti-zen moment when they see something that triggers them into realizing that they’ve always been living in a white matrix.
It can be highways, milk or whitewashed walls and then the big money grants swiftly follow.
In 2020, Walters, who already had a Ford Foundation fellowship, received a $100,000 grant from Creative Capital to write a “book-length polemic against the use of white paint in both interior and exterior spaces” using money looted from the hijacking and destruction of the Doris Duke Foundation. Doris Duke had wanted the money to be used to maintain her lovely house and gardens, instead the gardens were trashed and the money was used to fund, among other things, denunciations of white people with their white skins, white milk and white paint.
Creative Capital awards are highly selective and “over 76 percent identify as people of color, 54 percent identify as women, and 12 percent as trans or gender nonbinary; two identify as being disabled.” Are they actually disabled or do they merely identify as disabled? That’s the kind of question only a person who sits surrounded by white walls (as I do) would probably ask.
But hopefully the check from Creative Capital wasn’t white.
Six years later, a book on the evils of white paint is on the shortlist or the longlist for the National Book Awards. The book would have been timely back in 2020 and 2021 when any insane critical race theory polemic made the publishing industry swoon all the way down 5th Avenue.
BLMers can no longer afford mansions and they’ve been overshadowed by illegals and Hamas.
Winning isn’t a sure bet, after all other contenders in the NBA (the more woke and less athletic one) include a book by the spawn of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn about the revolutionary virtues of murdering innocent people as well as “The Rise of Islamophobia in America” so this is going to be a matchup between two generations of terrorism. And terrorists won the last one.
I’m not sure a warmed-over BLM manifesto is going to do it. But Walters got a lucky boost when Bret Stephens, the token non-woke New York Times columnist, included her book in a roundup of National Book Award absurdities including Hannah Lillith Assadi’s novel “inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father”, a novel that “explores Colombia’s queer underground community”, a “queer epic” set in Kingston, Jamaica and one about “a trans healthcare worker” who has been diagnosed with autism”. It’s a reminder that AOC’s claim about ‘Woke 1’ is a disingenuous political dodge and wokeness is alive, well and completely dominating everything.
But if Prof. Walters wins, maybe she’ll finally make enough money to paint her walls some other colors. Mobs of activists can rampage down hallways and paint them black. And we can have another reckoning over race because the last one just didn’t have a high enough body count.
Curiously enough, “A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint” is written on white paper.
No one has thus far announced a book on the evils of white paper and the virtues of blackness because a serious commitment to its principles would require printing it in dark mode. And most people don’t actually like reading entire pages full of white letters on a black background (probably because they’re racists who prefer blankness to encountering celestial myopia.)
But then most people don’t like dark spaces, let alone black walls, but prefer light. This isn’t a symbolic commentary on race, it’s just how our eyes and our souls work.
At least for those of us who can see light instead of race.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.
And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.
As a graphic designer, the use of white is loaded with visual and meaningful reasons as to when and why to use the color white. Racism is not one of them. This is ridiculous!
I read about a third of this out loud to my wife. She laughed and told I could stop reading out loud. Then I quit altogether. Can’t you find something interesting? I wish all columnists would boycott writing about everything woke and racist. It’s a waste of your talent