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“Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues �� every stately or lovely emblazoning �� the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge �� pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“For those of us who work to raise the racial consciousness of whites, simply getting whites to acknowledge that our race gives us advantages is a major effort. The defensiveness, denial, and resistance are deep.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“If there’s a place for tolerance in racial healing, perhaps it has to do with tolerating my own feelings of discomfort that arise when a person, of any color, expresses emotion not welcome in the culture of niceness. It also has to do with tolerating my own feelings of shame, humiliation, regret, anger, and fear so I can engage, not run. For me, tolerance is not about others, it’s about accepting my own uncomfortable emotions as I adjust to a changing view of myself as imperfect and vulnerable. As human.”
― Debby Irving, Waking Up White: And Finding Myself in the Story of Race

“My Country
I don't have any caps left made back home
Nor any shoes that trod your roads
I've worn out your last shirt quite long ago
It was of Sile cloth
Now you only remain in the whiteness of my hair
Intact in my heart
Now you only remain in the whiteness of my hair
In the lines of my forehead
My country
-Nazim Hikmet”
― Fatima Bhutto, Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir

“Racism is a complex and interconnected system that adapts to challenges over time. Colorblind ideology was a very effective adaptation to the challenges of the Civil Rights Era. Colorblind ideology allows society to deny the reality of racism in the face of its persistence, while making it more difficult to challenge than when it was openly espoused.”
― Robin DiAngelo, What Does It Mean to Be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy

“What does it mean when I say that 'I don't see race?' It means that because I learned to see no difference between 'white' and 'color,' I have white-washed my own sense of self. It means that I know more about what it is to be a white person than what it is to be Asian, and I am a stranger among both.”
― Michi Trota

“The customary way for white people to think about the topic of race—and it is only a topic to white people—is to ask, “How would it be if I were black?”��..

The way to approach it, I think, is…to seriously consider what it is like to be white.”
― Fran Lebowitz

“Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for the present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical description of the various species, or - in this place at least - to much of any description. My object here is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder. (moby dick chap 32 p131)”
― Herman Melville

“Racism has permeated psychology and psychiatry from its genesis. Early clinicians came from white, European backgrounds, and used their culture's social norms as the basis for what being healthy looked like. It was a very narrow and oppressive definition, which assumed that being genteel, well-dressed, well-read, and white were the marks of humanity, and that anyone who deviated from that standard was not a person, but an animal in need of being tamed.”
― Devon Price, Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

“I am weary with whiteness. To rule, to be civilized and chaste; you do not know what weariness it is. My woman yearns toward me in hunger, I am spent. All the world waves in darkling circles about my white uprightness, I am spent.”
― Waldo Frank, Holiday

“To delegitimize the West, it appears to be necessary first to demonize the people who still make up the racial majority in the West. It is necessary to demonize white people.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“…every moment that I spend in white space reinforces in me a particular (and limited) worldview and experience. But the deeper message being reinforced is that we lose nothing of value by living in segregation. In fact, the white the space is, the more likely it is to be perceived as “good�� and “safe�� in the white mind. This is a profound message that we must begin to grapple with��”
― Robin DiAngelo, Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm

“We divide ourselves into ‘us�� and ‘them�� based on all sorts of random and insignificant traits�� According to optimal distinctiveness theory, humans are drawn to social groups that simultaneously fulfill two conflicting needs - - a need for assimilation, or the desire for social connection, affiliation, inclusion, and belonging, and a need for differentiation, or the desire to be unique, special, and distinctive.”
― Robert Livingston, The Conversation: How Seeking and Speaking the Truth About Racism Can Radically Transform Individuals and Organizations

“Till you look past your whiteness, you cannot be human.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“White people caused genocide after genocide,
Yet you still boast about white superiority.
You proclaim that people of color are inferior,
While white society is the epitome of savagery.
After all the heartaches inflicted by white people,
A 100 generations worth apology won't be sufficient.
Yet I am human enough to declare, we are all equal;
All I ask is that, humans finally behave human.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“[...] white people are, ipso facto, deputized in the face of Black people, whether they know it (consciously) or not. Whiteness, then, and by extension civil society, cannot be solely “represented�� as some monumentalized coherence of phallic signifiers, but must first be understood as a social formation of contemporaries who do not magnetize bullets. This is the essence of their construction through an asignifying absence; their signifying presence is manifested by the fact that they are, if only by default, deputized against those who do magnetize bullets. In short, white people are not simply “protected�� by the police, they are��in their very corporeality—the police.”
― Frank B. Wilderson III, The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal

“[...] white people are, ipso facto, deputized in the face of Black people, whether they know it (consciously) or not. Whiteness, then, and by extension civil society, cannot be solely “represented�� as some monumentalized coherence of phallic signifiers, but must first be understood as a social formation of contemporaries who do not magnetize bullets. This is the essence of their construction through an asignifying absence; their signifying presence is manifested by the fact that they are, if only by default, deputized against those who do magnetize bullets. In short, white people are not simply “protected�� by the police, they are��in their very corporeality—the police.”
― Frank B. Wilderson III, The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal

“In a few short decades, the Western tradition has moved from being celebrated to being embarrassing and anachronistic and, finally, to being something shameful. lt turned from a story meant to inspire people and nurture them in their lives into a story meant to shame people. And it wasn't just the term "Western" that critics objected to. It was everything connected with it. Even "civilization" itself. As one of the gurus of modern racist "anti-racism," lbram X. Kendi put it, '"Civilization' itself is often a polite euphemism for cultural racism.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“Historical criticism and rethinking are never a bad idea. However, the hunt for visible, tangible problems shouldn't become a hunt for invisible, intangible problems. Especially not if they are carried out by dishonest people with the most extreme answers. If we allow malicious critics to misrepresent and hijack our past, then the future they plan off the back of this will not be harmonious. It will be hell.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“This is an unusual language for academics to write in: to boast that a particular collection of academics and teachers are, in fact, academics "with an activist dimension." And as for the admission that CRT seeks not just to understand society but to "transform it"? This is the language of revolutionary politics, not a language traditionally used in academia. But revolutionary activists were exactly those involved in GRT turned out to be.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“Race is now an issue in all Western countries in a way it has not been for decades. In the place of color blindness, we have been pushed into racial ultra-awareness. A deeply warped picture has now been painted.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“Like all societies in history, all Western nations have racism in their histories. But that is not the only history of our countries. Racism is not the sole lens through which our societies can be understood, and yet it is increasingly the only lens used. Everything in the past is seen as racist, and so everything in the past is tainted.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“What does Whiteness feel like?... I imagine it's like walking barefoot��”
― Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You

“Elder Heber C. Kimball told an audience of Latter-Day Saints, 'We are not accounted as white people, and we don't want to live among them.' He insisted, 'I had rather live with the buffalo in the wilderness.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“When people of color violate edicts of progressive orthodoxy, they become white supremacists. Obviously.”
― Gad Saad, The Saad Truth about Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life

“The reason for high rates of black poverty and crime is not -systemic racism-, but the absence of fathers in the lives of so many black families. The research showing that this is true is vast and has been known for decades, even if progressives prefer to ignore it or deny it or blame -systemic racism-.”
― Gad Saad, The Saad Truth about Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life

“In June 2020 they post a black square and from then on, they post frolicky Black women in the company's cottage core aesthetic and say they acknowledge they have to do better.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“It sounds like you'd prefer if people treated you less like a generalization and more like a human being. Like how White people treat White people."
She bites her lip cautiously, then says, "Right."
"And your outward appearance is the only thing preventing this from becoming a reality."
"Exactly!" she says.
"I know what you're feeling," you say. "And I don't think it's Whiteness.”
― Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You