“Have We Hit Peak Whiteness?”
“Teeth-bleaching may be the peak of the Western world’s obsession with getting whites whiter. It’s the same impulse we see in our laundry detergents and sparkling consumer products. “In our society, it’s perceived that whiter and brighter is better,” Perry says.
Yet increasingly our obsession with whiteness is clashing with science and medicine, which have begun to question the idea that cleanliness and sterility — the values that give white its symbolic power — are better for our health. Hygiene is critical in certain contexts, like a hospital room, but carrying its power unconsciously into every part of our lives could hurt more than help us…
The union of white and purity in Western culture may have its first roots in religion. That’s how Kathleen Brown, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, sees it. “Historically, white is one of the ways men of the cloth signified their calling,” Brown says. Later, this association with religious purity evolved into bodily purity. (“Cleanliness is, indeed, next to godliness,” declared John Wesley in an 18th-century sermon.) Brown’s book, Foul Bodies, chronicles cleanliness in Europe beginning with its colonial expansion, and in early America up to the Civil War. Cleanliness, she says, was signified by a growing profusion of white undergarments, worn against the skin beneath the outer clothes, and then spilling forth in ruffled cuffs and collars. The undergarments were seen as having a cleansing power, the stains they collected a sign that they were drawing dirt from the body.
White became an indicator of class and wealth. The richer you were, the finer, whiter, and more intricate were your linens, and wealthy people changed them every day…
White’s powerful symbolism, of course, has darker connotations. Brown points out that as European colonists encountered other groups in America and West Africa, there was “a new interest in whiteness both as an indicator that clothes were clean, but also a racial indicator of a kind of refinement and civility.” In portraits of 17th- and 18th-century European settlers, particularly women, faces “start to glow like weird white ghosts,” Brown says, showing their purity as bearers of civilization. In later years, white’s symbolism was appropriated into ideas of racial purity, manifested in Nazi language like “racial hygiene” and Ku Klux Klan garb.”
http://nautil.us/issue/26/color/have-we-hit-peak-whiteness
An interesting reflection. There is so, so much symbolism with white; at my friends’ private girls school, they all graduated in white dresses; at my public high school, the girls wore white graduate gowns and the boys wore green (after administrators dismissed my protest, my friends and I graduated wearing toy stethoscopes in protest).
And I remember being in elementary school, watching movies and reading books and understanding that if a character was introduced in association with the color white (white knight; white fairy; a woman wearing a white dress; etc…) that character was going to be good and hard-working and part of the solution — and a character introduced in association with black or brown was an infiltrator, a threat to the perfections of the world. Typically this was a villian; at best, some skulking background figure.
These things get into you.
