White Quotes

“Just as the vampires’ whiteness conveys their own deadness, so too their bringing of death is signalled by whiteness – their victims grow pale, the colour leaves their cheeks, life ebbs away. The horror of vampirism is expressed in colour: ghastly white, disgustingly cadaverous, without the blood of life that would give colour. The vampire's bite, so evidently a metaphor for sexuality, is debilitating unto death, just as white people fear sexuality if it is allowed to get out of control (out from under the will) – yet, like the vampire, they need it. The vampire is the white man or woman in the grip of a libidinal need s/he cannot master. In the act of vampirism, white society (the vampire) feeds off itself (his/her victims) and threatens to destroy itself. All”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“It is at the heart of the vampire myth. The vampire is dead but also brings death. Because vampires are dead, they are pale, cadaverous, white. They bring themselves a kind of life by sucking the blood of the living, and at such points may appear flushed with red, the colour of life: Hammer”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“Within Western art the dead white body has often been a sight of veneration, an object of beauty. While Christ on the cross may often be an image of agony, it is also one of beauty, with the suffering itself part of the transcendent beauty. In”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“Death may in some traditions be a vivid experience, but within much of the white tradition it is a blank that may be immateriality (pure spirit) or else just nothing at all. This is within the logics of whiteness even if it is not at the forefront of white identity. White people have a colour, but it is a colour that also signifies the absence of colour, itself a characteristic of life and presence. In the transparent representation of the culture of light, the white face has to be read in the blanks on the paper or screen. To be positioned as an over- seeing subject without properties may lead one to wonder if one is a subject at all. If it is spirit not body that makes a person white, then where does this leave the white body which is the vehicle for the reproduction of whiteness, of white power and possession, here on earth?”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“The secularisation and feminine specification of this seems to have been effected through the figure of the woman as angel, enlightened and enlightening. Theologically, angels have no gender, and in the Bible and medieval art they were depicted as male and manly. With the Renaissance, they begin to be depicted either as women or as men with ‘feminine’ traits (Underhill 1995: 56). Verbal and visual imagery of the angelic begins to be applied to idealised, or just simply adored, women. Edmund”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“The development of an image of the glowing human being can be traced in European art. One index of it is the means for representing haloes. In medieval art, these are gold, very material, silhouetting the head; since the Renaissance, they have seemed to radiate from the head, in turn suffusing it with a glow. Rudolph”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“They glow rather than shine. The light within or from above appears to suffuse the body. Shine, on the other hand, is light bouncing back off the surface of the skin. It is the mirror effect of sweat, itself connoting physicality, the emissions of the body and unladylike labour, in the sense of both work and parturition. In a well-known Victorian saw, animals sweated, and even gentlemen perspired, but ladies merely glowed. Dark”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“Light from above is virtuously Northern; it is also, as the last quotation suggests, celestial. Heaven had been seen as a place of light since around the twelfth century (McDannell and Lang 1988: 80ff.) Film”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“figure of the ideal Aryan, with blond hair and blue eyes – hair the colour of the sun, eyes the colour of the sky. The supreme embodiment of Western humanity is Christ, whose whitening in Christian iconography was such that his ‘hair and his beard were given the colour of sunshine, the brightness of the light above, while his eyes retained the colour of the sky from which he descended and to which he returned’ (Bastide 1967: 315).”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“Yet the lure of the ideal is also, often imperceptibly, haunted by misgiving, even anxiety. Not only is whiteness as absence impossible, it is not wholly desirable. To relinquish dirt and stains, corporeality and thingness, is also to relinquish both the pleasures of the flesh and the reproduction upon which whiteness as racial power depends. To be nothing is to be dead, something”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“The ideal of whiteness makes a strong appeal. It flatters white people by associating them with (what they define as) the best in human beauty and virtue. The very idea of a best and of striving towards it accords with the aspirational structure of whiteness. There is an ecstasy to be felt in the luminescent representation discussed in the next chapter, a luminescence that makes sense in the context of the idea of whiteness as transcendence, dissolution into pure spirit and no-thing-ness. Equally, the ideal of white as absence may be confounded with the wider representational mode discussed above: being nothing at all may readily be felt as being nothing in particular, the representative human, the subject without properties.”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“The Virgin Mary is the supreme exemplar of this feminine whiteness. Her fair hair 20 and complexion, often white robes and association with lilies and doves all constitute her undisputed virtue in terms of white hue and skin (cf. Bernard 1987, Kovachevski 1991). Mary is an image of motherhood without intercourse (thus unstained by sex). She is never seen pregnant. She goes even further than the most refined white lady: she reproduces without sex. The case of Mary discloses what is at the heart of the conception of whiteness as virtue, namely absence. This”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“In Western tradition, white is beautiful because it is the colour of virtue. This remarkable equation relates to a particular definition of goodness. All lists of the moral connotations of white as symbol in Western culture are the same: purity, spirituality, transcendence, cleanliness, virtue, simplicity, chastity. In”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“As Lucy Hughes-Hallett (1990: 253) puts it, her reputation for beauty, though unsupported by any historical evidence, was unassailable, but it was not consonant with the possibility of her being any other than a light-skinned European lady, for in fiction beauty (as distinct from sexual magnetism) has traditionally been the prerogative of social and ethnic élites … the vast majority of pre-nineteenth-century writers and artists simply circumvented [this problem] by abolishing Cleopatra's foreignness and changing her appearance to suit their own ideals.”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“The history of representations of Cleopatra provides one of the clearest instances of the conviction that whiteness is the pinnacle of human beauty. Cleopatra became a byword for feminine beauty in European culture, but in the process she had to be represented as white. As”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“As in many colonialist fictions, white women in The Jewel in the Crown voice a liberal critique of empire and are in part to blame for its decline. Because of their social marginality and because, when they do anything, they do harm, the only honourable position for them, the only really white position, is that of doing nothing. Because they are creatures of conscience this is a source of agony. Yet it is an exquisite agony, stretched out over fifteen languid hours. It bears witness to the greater sensitivity of women and other marginals. It even suggests that there may be an Oriental holiness to be derived from helpless inaction. Women take the blame, and provide the spectacle of moral suffering, for the loss of empire. For this they are rewarded with a possibility that already matches their condition of narrative existence: nothing.”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture