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Back in the heyday of Martin Luther King, Jr., the stated goal of the civil rights movement was to strengthen the harmony of American society by persuading the nation’s less enlightened white citizens to transcend their preoccupation with skin color. In this era of critical race theory, all of us who happen to be relatively low on melanin are being told that that attribute imposes upon us an all-consuming and ineradicable moral burden and that our primary obligation as conscientious human beings, therefore, is to recognize the utter centrality of race in every aspect of our lives, to accept the proposition that those of us who are white have been responsible for the vilest brand of racism ever since our infancy (if not earlier), and to spend our lives wallowing in guilt and expressing contrition for that racism — even though, according to the nefarious ideology underlying all this bilge, we’ll never be able to atone sufficiently for our past racism, never be fully absolved of it, and, in fact, never really stop being racist.
Whiteness, in short, is permanent culpability; for those afflicted with it, it’s the real original sin. And the academic discipline known as “whiteness studies” is an intrinsic part of the all-important effort to discover race — and racial bigotry — even in the seemingly most innocuous aspects of our lives.
This brings us to Ingrid Halland, an associate professor at the Department of Linguistics, Literary, and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen in Norway. Halland’s current area of research concerns the chemical compound titanium dioxide, which, mined in Sokndal, Norway, was first transformed by Norwegian scientists of a century ago into a breakthrough product that became internationally popular. Halland’s modest claim is that this popularity was, in large part, a reflection of racism. For titanium dioxide, you see, is the pigment used in the very best white paint — a pigment that, since its introduction, has made possible walls and other surfaces that are “whiter than white.”
Which, Halland insists, is a problem — a big one. In her projected academic study, “How Norway Made the World Whiter” — news of which has reached English-language readers in recent days thanks to a widely reprinted Fox News news story — Halland plans to reflect on the question of how her native country, by giving the world a substance that “is present in literally every part of modern life,” has not only “led to an aesthetic desire for white surfaces” but has also been inextricably connected with “racist attitudes,” reinforcing the perhaps largely unconscious acceptance by white people worldwide of the ways in which their own skin color is wrapped up in “privilege” and “systematic exclusion” and thereby in furthering the evils of “cultural racism and white supremacy.”
In a recent scholarly article, Halland acknowledged that TiO2 isn’t chemically toxic — but added that its introduction into the world of wall paint “created conditions for the emergence of attitudes toward color that could be said to be socially toxic.” Modern art and architecture, by “establish[ing] white as the nondominant background par excellence,” such that certain kinds of buildings (notably museums) could hardly exist without the whitest of white walls, “cleared the ground for cultural racism, ideas about white superiority, and the chromophobic [yes, ‘chromophobic’] exclusion internalized in architectural aesthetics.” In order to justify drawing this tenuous-seeming link between paint colors and race issues, Halland makes much of a 100-year-old newspaper ad, discovered in the archives of some obscure Norwegian printing company, in which a giant white statue of the god Titan — the logo of a TiO2 mining firm called Titania — is shown picking up little black children and bathing them in white paint.
