Top 35 Whiteness Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Whiteness Quotes from famous people such as Sarah McBride, Rebecca Traister, Rachel Dolezal, William R. Alger, Alice Walker, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

My whiteness, economic privilege, able-bodied privilege

My whiteness, economic privilege, able-bodied privilege, family support, and so many other factors shield me from some of the worst possible consequences – often fatal ones – that result from the toxic combination of misogyny, racism, and anti-trans sentiment.
Sarah McBride
‘The Cosby Show’ was a show about black people that was fundamentally and unequivocally friendly to whiteness and to white people. The Huxtables had white friends.
Rebecca Traister
Blackness better defines who I am philosophically and socially than whiteness does.
Rachel Dolezal
Even pearls are dark before the whiteness of his teeth.
William R. Alger
I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.
Alice Walker
There’s this sense that whiteness is the default and does not need to be questioned. That you’ve got a race if you’re black, or any kind of Asian, or any kind of Native American, but that you have no race if you are white.
Celeste Ng
I don’t identify as white. I have a complex relationship with whiteness.
Rostam Batmanglij
The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing – a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.
W. E. B. Du Bois
For black people, everything we do has to be ratified and endorsed by a power structure that is white. And that reinforces a kind of racial hierarchy where whiteness is the privileged position to be in, and ethnicity is problematic.
Kerry James Marshall
While I acknowledge that it’s not my whiteness that has given me my platform entirely… it’s part of the reason I’ve garnered so much acceptance and praise for being out and nonbinary.
Asia Kate Dillon
White Southerners created an entire cosmetics industry equating beauty with whiteness and trained a string of winning Miss Americas who embodied their racial ideal in a national representative.
Asha Rangappa
The entertainment industry is a microcosm of the real world. To be ‘othered’ within the industry is a reflection of where we have been cast in the outside world, existing in the margins of society for decades witnessing cisgendered, heterosexual whiteness as the clearly defined default to which we must cater.
Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman
Whiteness is dynamic, relational, and operating at all times and on myriad levels. These processes and practices include basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purported to be commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people.
Robin DiAngelo
Since I got to this country when I was 12, I’ve been obsessed with this idea of whiteness and blackness because I realized I was neither. For me, it was so important to me to make a film that focused on whiteness because you wouldn’t have blackness if you didn’t have whiteness.
Jose Antonio Vargas
Chefs don’t use white pepper just to avoid spoiling the whiteness of pommes puree or bechamel. It has a more peppery aroma, with sharpness and sweetness, too.
Yotam Ottolenghi
Well, I think that I have a complicated relationship with whiteness because oftentimes, I pass as white, and I recognize that. I would be disingenuous to pretend that I don’t pass as white.
Rostam Batmanglij
I have an upfront, sort of in-the-trenches knowledge of white people’s trying to avoid their whiteness and replace it with something else. When I met my wife, we went through the whole race-slash-ethnicity conversation, and she told me she was Italian. Later on, I find out she’s a quarter Italian, at best.
W. Kamau Bell
Our holiness is an effect, not a cause; so long as our eyes are on our own personal whiteness as an end in itself, the thing breaks down.
Charles Simeon
The symbolic power of Barack Obama’s presidency – that whiteness was no longer strong enough to prevent peons taking up residence in the castle – assaulted the most deeply rooted notions of white supremacy and instilled fear in its adherents and beneficiaries.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
In America, mixed-race identity tends to invite both curiosity and suspicion, largely because few have found a way to interrogate it without centering whiteness as the scale by which to evaluate blackness.
Jenna Wortham
If half-black Barack Obama had decided years ago to call himself white – which his genes certainly entitled him to do – his story would have carried very different meaning. If millions of part-black people had followed him into whiteness, then the N.A.A.C.P. would be in true crisis.
Eric Liu
If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness – just a drop of it – does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.
Eric Liu
The interesting thing about white power and the desperate white knuckling grip on this thing call whiteness, which is a myth in itself, is that black folks… we’re not asking you to invent new laws for us. We’re asking you to include us in the laws that are already on the books.
Jesse Williams
I always feel like I’m warring with my womanhood and wanting the world to be better, and with my blackness – which is the opposite of whiteness.
Jessica Williams
I want all types of people to look at my work and see themselves, just like I watch a Reese Witherspoon movie as a black woman and can empathize with her because we have had to internalize whiteness in that way to survive.
Amy Sherald
Again and again, I find something eerie in many Irish occasions – the unrelenting whiteness, the emotional tribal attachments, the violent prejudices lurking beneath apparently pleasant social surfaces, the cosy smugness of belonging.
Tom Paulin
The most glaring aspect of white privilege is that when someone is described neutrally – without indicating color or ethnicity – more often than not, people will assume that the person is white. That assumption indicates an uncomfortable truth: in our society, whiteness determines humanity.
Luvvie Ajayi
The white men of the South had better make up their minds that the blacks will remain in the South just as long as corn will tassel and cotton will bloom into whiteness.
Timothy Thomas Fortune
To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Everything gleamed or glinted on TV in the ’70s, from the ‘flavor crystals’ in Folgers coffee to the yellow dentures dipped in Polident and instantly restored to pristine, piano-key whiteness.
Steve Rushin
No one tells every white person in this country how to be. No one tells every Hispanic, or Asian or Jewish person in this country how to be. There is no single definition of whiteness or single definition of blackness.
Montel Williams
If you read some of the recent literature, there is no

If you read some of the recent literature, there is no such thing as whiteness. But we made it up. Not my original thought, but it’s true. Because you were born white, you have advantages systemically, culturally, psychology there. They have been built up for hundreds of years. Many people can’t look at it.
Gregg Popovich
In the music industry, you can’t create success without having to engage a white man. It’s just not possible. Whether it’s executives, A&Rs, and the people that hold the key to your paper, inevitably, you’ll be met with whiteness.
Kelela
The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul is not likely to lose it in any other.
Alexander Smith
The very definition of ‘blackness’ is as broad as that of ‘whiteness,’ yet we’re seemingly always trying to find a specific, limited definition.
Issa Rae