Dr Katie

“figure of the ideal Aryan, with blond hair and blue eyes – hair the colour of the sun, eyes the colour of the sky. The supreme embodiment of Western humanity is Christ, whose whitening in Christian iconography was such that his ‘hair and his beard were given the colour of sunshine, the brightness of the light above, while his eyes retained the colour of the sky from which he descended and to which he returned’ (Bastide 1967: 315).”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“They glow rather than shine. The light within or from above appears to suffuse the body. Shine, on the other hand, is light bouncing back off the surface of the skin. It is the mirror effect of sweat, itself connoting physicality, the emissions of the body and unladylike labour, in the sense of both work and parturition. In a well-known Victorian saw, animals sweated, and even gentlemen perspired, but ladies merely glowed. Dark”
― 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

“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