RIGHT SPEAK: National Book Foundation Honors Book About White Paint Being Racist: The author of Dead White says paint color is a matter of ‘life and death’ and admits she has ‘a genuine and visceral dislike of white paint.’

National Book Foundation Honors Book About White Paint Being Racist:

The author of Dead White says paint color is a matter of ‘life and death’ and admits she has ‘a genuine and visceral dislike of white paint.’

The prestigious National Book Awards have many famous and acclaimed past winners, from Don DeLillo’s White Noise in 1985 to Alice Walker’s The Color Purple in 1983. Of those previous victors, only the latter could be allowed to win in 2026, as the color white is now officially racist.
The longlist for the National Book Foundation’s annual awards was announced last month, with one of the nominated nonfiction titles, Wendy S. Walters’ Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint, being published this week by Simon & Schuster. The book’s blurb describes it as an “impassioned, boundary-pushing work of criticism traversing an array of subjects” — but mainly the single, highly niche subject of white paint and why it is incredibly racist.

Beyond the Pale

The author is a black Columbia University writing professor and poet who has previously written books “imagining a black takeover of Norway” (through immigration, perhaps?). She first realized white paint was racist some years ago after becoming absolutely disgusted by “the frequency with which the walls of educational spaces are painted in white” as opposed to in luminous pink zig-zags with iridescent yellow polka-dots.

“It’s hard to identify a material,” continues the PR material, that “has received less critical examination than white paint.” (Maybe real academics were too busy studying materials like plutonium, graphene, silicon, or insulin.)

A blanconormative society, the authoress tells us, pretends that white paint is “neutral,” that it “has no signifiers,” and therefore is the natural background to national life across America, as white-skinned people were supposed to be, socially speaking, in the recent past. On the other hand, whenever Walters wishes to make the opposite argument, suddenly white paint morphs and becomes full of positive qualities like “calmness, “cleanliness,” and “purity.” She prejudicially imagines these qualities as shared by the white people who mixed and then daubed the paint.

The reasons for her “genuine and visceral dislike of white paint,” “a feeling” she “at times” finds “overwhelming,” are predictably strange. It turns out white paint, like Wite-Out or Liquid Paper, operates as an agent of white supremacy, insinuating itself “into systems of erasure, exclusion, violence, and the masking of power in the social and natural world,” as when vandals had used white paint to deface various monuments to diversity:

White supremacists splattered white paint at the entrance to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, a much-beloved non-sectarian site of cultural and artistic significance to the community in which it resides. The public outcry extended across the world. … A rainbow crosswalk affirming the welcome of LGBTQIA+ persons in Woodstock, New Brunswick, Canada, was painted over with white paint, rectangle by rectangle, and a huge splatter of white paint was left in the center to emphasize the act of intolerance.

Walters got an actual grant from the Creative Capital Foundation to write this thing. The award was described as “lucrative,” and Creative Capital grants can be up to $50,000. The grant was awarded way back in 2020. This means it must have taken her something like six years to write her screed about why white is the natural color of the Ku Klux Klan.

According to pre-publication reviews, the book isn’t entirely about why white paint is racist; it also deals with how the hue is complicit in acts of human rights abuse of all kinds. White is the natural color of torture chambers. Totalitarian regimes purportedly employ it in “white room torture,” locking victims inside a room painted all-white, with all-white furnishings and all-white clothing, and feeding them all-white foods to produce states of severe psychosis. (It is rumored some victims even begin to think they are real university professors, engaged in real academic disciplines.)

Hue and Crybaby
Inadvertently amusing promotional videos make Walters’ book sound like a kind of ultra-bizarre horror film, released just in time for Halloween: --->READ MORE HERE