Dr Katie

“Light from above is virtuously Northern; it is also, as the last quotation suggests, celestial. Heaven had been seen as a place of light since around the twelfth century (McDannell and Lang 1988: 80ff.) Film”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“The history of representations of Cleopatra provides one of the clearest instances of the conviction that whiteness is the pinnacle of human beauty. Cleopatra became a byword for feminine beauty in European culture, but in the process she had to be represented as white. As”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“Yet the lure of the ideal is also, often imperceptibly, haunted by misgiving, even anxiety. Not only is whiteness as absence impossible, it is not wholly desirable. To relinquish dirt and stains, corporeality and thingness, is also to relinquish both the pleasures of the flesh and the reproduction upon which whiteness as racial power depends. To be nothing is to be dead, something”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“The ideal of whiteness makes a strong appeal. It flatters white people by associating them with (what they define as) the best in human beauty and virtue. The very idea of a best and of striving towards it accords with the aspirational structure of whiteness. There is an ecstasy to be felt in the luminescent representation discussed in the next chapter, a luminescence that makes sense in the context of the idea of whiteness as transcendence, dissolution into pure spirit and no-thing-ness. Equally, the ideal of white as absence may be confounded with the wider representational mode discussed above: being nothing at all may readily be felt as being nothing in particular, the representative human, the subject without properties.”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture