Micaiah Bilger writes for the College Fix about a dubious academic prize involving an Ivy League professor.
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.
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