Whiteness is one of today’s key societal and political concerns. Within and beyond academia worldwide, actions of revolt and regret seek to cope with our racial past. In the pivotal works in whiteness studies within art and architecture history, whiteness is understood as cultural and visual structures of privilege. The new research project ‘How Norway Made the World Whiter’ (NorWhite) funded by the Research Council of Norway (12 million NOK), addresses, however, a distinctively different battleground for politics of whiteness in art and architecture. Two core premises underpin the project: Whiteness is not only a cultural and societal condition tied to skin color, privileges, and systematic exclusion, but materialize everywhere around us. Second, one cannot understand this materialization without understanding the societal, technological and aesthetic conditions of the color itself.
A reader pointed that white paint on roofs is a way to reduce infrared heating of buildings, which reduces air conditioning needs. So Green is White Supremacy!
Well, let's see them outlaw puffy white clouds in a blue sky on a sunny day.
ReplyDeleteWhom gods destroy, they first make mad.
The use of Titanium Dioxide in coatings was a Norwegian innovation. Going on an "Anti- that-color-of-coating" crusade seems particularly untimely, as:
ReplyDeleteA: Everyone is concerned with solar reflectivity (albedo) of their roofs for both local heat-island and energy-use aspects, so commercial building roofs are turning that color everywhere.
B: We've not recovered from the factory fires that have turned almost all new cars into a spectrum on the black-white continuum or a spectrum on the mud-white continuum.
Awesome. Green is White Supremacy!
DeleteForty years ago the Germans said, "The Green Tree has Red Roots."
DeleteEnvironmentalism is White Supremacy.