The world according to the colour 'white'
I've recently picked up again a book I find fascinating, which is The World According to Colour by James Fox. If I remember correctly, I started reading it in the first year of university, and now I am graduating (hopefully). I strongly believe I am not very consistent, or well, I am consistent when I have the energy to be it.
Each chapter of the book is dedicated to a specific colour: black, red, yellow, blue, white, purple, and green. It's been one year or more since the last time I read it, hence I found myself finishing the blue chapter (incredible) and starting the white chapter. I specifically want to write about white.
Obviously, the discourse touched on the topic of white supremacy and its discriminatory effects. Fox talks about cleanliness and the concept of 'pure' with which the colour white is connected. Therefore, following a deep analysis of the colour from a social, historical, and philosophical point of view (and probably many other aspects), European people, who were identified as 'white' by Carl Linnaeus (one of the first to divide humans into races in the eighteenth century), associated themselves as the superior 'race', as their 'whiteness' was proof of their uncontaminated nature (pure and clean).
The colour of the year 2026 was identified as white. I saw many people see this as proof of the return of instances that signal the shift of the general mindset to extreme conservatism and white supremacy - simply put, opinions close to fascism and nazist idealism. This association is not groundless: think about Trump being re-elected and the geopolitical crisis we are living in, with wars and genocides at the center of social attention.
From a more "superficial" aspect, think about the controversial American Eagle jeans ad "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans"(controversial especially in the contemporary historical and political context), with American actress Sydney Sweeney - white, blonde, blue eyes.
Someone would argue that it's just a colour, which doesn't represent a socially and geopolitically critical period. However, it wouldn't be the first correlation between white colour and the rise of a radical political ideology based on discrimination. In the first half of the 1900s, modern artists increasingly saw the renunciation of colour [represented by the colour white] as a kind of cleansing process: an attempt to strip their disciplines of the filth and clutter that accumulated over the centuries, so they could create artworks purer even than those made by the Greek. Theo van Doesburg of the artistic and avant-garde movement De Stijl wrote in 1929:
WHITE This is the spiritual color of our times, the clearness of which directs all our actions. It is neither grey nor ivory white, but pure white.
WHITE This is the color of modern times, the color which dissipates a whole era; our era is one of perfection, purity and certitude.
WHITE It includes everything
We have superseded both the 'brown' of decadence and classicism and the 'blue' of divisionismo, the cult of the blue sky, the goda with green beards and the spectrum.
White pure white.
In 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, hence he gained control of the government and legally established a dictatorship.