A Quote by Kerry James Marshall

The privileged position of whiteness doesn't allow for someone with one drop of Negro blood to be considered white, which allows whiteness to be a fairly pure category while blackness has to absorb an expansive reality of representation.

Kerry James Marshall

Quote Topics

Absorb Allow Blackness Blood Category Considered Drop Expansive Fairly Position Privileged Pure Reality Representation Someone Which While White Whiteness

Quote Author

Kerry James Marshall
American - Artist
Born: October 17, 1955

Since I got to this country when I was 12, I've been obsessed with this idea of whiteness and blackness because I realized I was neither. For me, it was so important to me to make a film that focused on whiteness because you wouldn't have blackness if you didn't have whiteness.

Jose Antonio Vargas

I think the idea that you're somehow rejecting whiteness if you don't identify yourself as biracial is odd because everybody engages in whiteness. If you live in America, you're doing whiteness all the time, even if you have no white people in your family.

Melissa Harris-Perry

I believe that also it should be stressed and made clear that our antagonistic position is not to say "I don't like whites" for the simple fact of not liking white people. It's like, our fight is not against the white person per se, but against the exercises of white supremacy and the form in which whiteness and the politics of whiteness operates.

Bocafloja

Whiteness is not a culture . . . Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position . . . . Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist, and the white skin would have no more social significance than big feet

Noel Ignatiev

For black people, everything we do has to be ratified and endorsed by a power structure that is white. And that reinforces a kind of racial hierarchy where whiteness is the privileged position to be in, and ethnicity is problematic.

Kerry James Marshall

That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.

John Milton

We assume whiteness is the default because whiteness, historically, has been the default. This is one of the many reasons diverse representation matters so much. We need to change the default.

Roxane Gay

If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness - just a drop of it - does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.

Eric Liu

The areas in which I teach are working-class history and African-American Studies and at its best the critical study of whiteness often grows out of those areas. The critical examination of whiteness, academic and not, simply involves the effort to break through the illusion that whiteness is natural, biological, normal, and not crying out for explanation.

David Roediger

I always feel like I'm warring with my womanhood and wanting the world to be better, and with my blackness - which is the opposite of whiteness.

Jessica Williams

I don't know what people mean when they ask me whether I'm embracing my whiteness. Whiteness is ubiquitous.

Melissa Harris-Perry

We live in a world in which it's harder to talk about the American in the singular, so we're a multi. We have several different people who represent the United States, so in that sense whiteness, the salience, the importance of whiteness is kind of tamping down some.

Nell Irvin Painter

For radical white writers wishing to forge interracial movements of poor and working people, whiteness has also long been a problem, with Alexander Saxton and Ted Allen making especially full efforts to understand whiteness in order to disillusion whites unable to see past the value of their own skins.

David Roediger

Im not really about blackness, per se, but about blackness and whiteness, and what they mean and how they interact with one another and what power is all about.

Kara Walker

The coming of Christ means a denial of what we thought we were. It means destroying the white devil in us. Reconciliation to God means that white people are prepared to deny themselves (whiteness), take up the cross (blackness) and follow Christ (black ghetto).