A Quote by Roxane Gay

Whiteness is not the default in my fiction.

Roxane Gay

Quote Topics

Default Fiction Whiteness

Quote Author

Roxane Gay
American - Writer

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

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

Whenever you're dealing with something that's difficult to describe, that you can't get across to someone in a sound bite, it sounds like the normal default is to pick what's easiest, and in the case of fiction written by women, fiction involving women, fiction involving any sort of relationship, the word that comes to mind is 'romance.'

Diana Gabaldon

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

Melissa Harris-Perry

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

There's this sense that whiteness is the default and does not need to be questioned. That you've got a race if you're black, or any kind of Asian, or any kind of Native American, but that you have no race if you are white.

Celeste Ng

The entertainment industry is a microcosm of the real world. To be 'othered' within the industry is a reflection of where we have been cast in the outside world, existing in the margins of society for decades witnessing cisgendered, heterosexual whiteness as the clearly defined default to which we must cater.

Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman

Not surprisingly, thinkers from groups for whom whiteness was and is a problem have taken the lead in studying whiteness in this way. Such study began with slave folktales and American Indian stories of contact with whites.

David Roediger

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

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

I was able to use credit default swaps to protect not only my investments but the hundreds of jobs that exist because of my investment. I understand the dangers of credit default swaps and the benefits of credit default swaps.

Jeff Greene

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

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 flew throughout the summer and fall and the start of winter. At first the whiteness gave way to the green of summer, and then gold covered the fields and forests, and then the whiteness again.