Dr Katie

“In Western tradition, white is beautiful because it is the colour of virtue. This remarkable equation relates to a particular definition of goodness. All lists of the moral connotations of white as symbol in Western culture are the same: purity, spirituality, transcendence, cleanliness, virtue, simplicity, chastity. In”
― 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

“As Lucy Hughes-Hallett (1990: 253) puts it, her reputation for beauty, though unsupported by any historical evidence, was unassailable, but it was not consonant with the possibility of her being any other than a light-skinned European lady, for in fiction beauty (as distinct from sexual magnetism) has traditionally been the prerogative of social and ethnic élites … the vast majority of pre-nineteenth-century writers and artists simply circumvented [this problem] by abolishing Cleopatra's foreignness and changing her appearance to suit their own ideals.”
― 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