Last week, the Arch-Hand-Wringer of Canterbury, Justin Welby, thought he had been April Fool’s pranked about a fortnight too early. Seeing a job advert for a £36,000-a-year “Deconstructing Whiteness Officer” for the Diocese of Birmingham, he called diocese up and asked it why the ad had not been “written in English”. The local Bishop could just have replied: “Because it’s intended to be read by the people of Birmingham,” but instead the person provided an answer to the effect that the job was really about “mak[ing] sure that those from ethnic minority backgrounds [but not necessarily those from ethnic majority backgrounds…] who apply for jobs in the Church of England have a level playing field”.
Archbishop Welby was not wholly convinced. “What on Earth does that mean?” he asked, before going on Times Radio to complain that the whole thing sounded “a bit like” a joke from the satirical BBC sit-com W1A (one of the Beeb’s few remaining recent funny ones, it should be noted). Indeed, in the spirit of W1A, according to Dr. Reverend Ian Paul, a rare non-woke member of the CofE, the anti-racist job advert had subsequently had to be withdrawn… for being racist.
The difference between genuine and fake news stories relating to ‘anti-racist’ – or, more realistically, anti-white – ideas and events these days is slim indeed, making it hard to tell the difference between the real ones and the spoofs, as the Archbishop of Canterbury himself so recently found. In 2020, for example, following the death of George Floyd due to the existence of white people and their evil forces of law enforcement, someone called Hannah Stubbs posted a petition on online platform change.org, requesting signatures to get the White Cliffs of Dover renamed by HM Government as the Black Lives Matter Cliffs of Dover so as not to offend any of the very many non-white individuals then heading rapidly towards them illegally in small boats.
According to Hannah’s rationale:
Is it really appropriate and sensitive in this day and age to persist in calling a national symbol ‘white’? The fact that these cliffs are called ‘white’ stands as a racially-insensitive reminder of white privilege and white dominance in a country where many people are Black or Minority Ethnic. Why should marginalised people have to utter the name of the race that oppresses them in order to refer to a geological feature?
After the petition caused outrage, Hannah’s effort was deemed likely to be intended as a satirical spoof by the site’s administrators and taken down (although it is archived here) – but how can we be absolutely certain she didn’t mean this demand to be taken seriously? These days, there really is no surefire way of telling.
With all this in mind, here is a fun/deeply depressing (you decide!) Easter Week quiz from the Daily Sceptic, asking readers if they can tell which of the following four perfectly harmless white things have genuinely been condemned as being racist, and which have not. Answers at the end: looking them up before you have played is yet another unacceptable example of self-entitled white privilege in action, so don’t.
1. Why are White Statues So White?
Whenever you go to a museum to stare at those lovely white marble sculptures from the days of Classical-era Greece and Rome, do you ever stop to ask yourself: why are these statues all so white? To be fair, this would actually be a somewhat legitimate question. Many such items were genuinely once painted in bright colours but, as tends to happen as the millennia pass by, such pigments faded and flaked down the years. If only the equally white-skinned Lord Elgin had been around in 1,000 BC to take them all back home to the British Museum for safe-keeping several thousand years earlier than he had been, perhaps this travesty would not have come to pass.
To certain obsessive-minded academics, the fact such figures are displayed inside contemporary Western museums without their paint back on is actually a deliberate cover-up of the truth that not every dweller on ancient Mediterranean shores was necessarily as white as the marble their sculptures are made from: a form of “retroactive whitewashing”, as it has been termed. This does rather ignore the fact that, as the Greeks actually tended to make their own statues from brown-coloured bronze, as opposed to Aryan-coloured marble, collective displays of those tend to look more like contemporary snapshots of the Diocese of Birmingham, c.2024, as opposed to that of the fictional Aryan ice-continent of Ultima Thule, c.5,000 BC, but never mind: these things must be condemned nonetheless.
After all, during the 20th century, no lesser figures than Hitler and Mussolini expressed their great liking for classical, white-coloured marble statuary. Apparently, Nazi race-ideologues even took measurements from Classical-era sculptures in order to create their race-index databases of the ideal measurements, ratios and proportions of the ideal Aryan human frame: so, the British Museum and the Apollo of Belvedere really caused WWII and the Holocaust.
The problem could be fixed by going all Al Jolson on such items and throwing buckets of black paint or smearing boot-polish all over their heads and faces, but this could be considered vandalism (unless performed by members of Just Stop Oil, of course. As a result, some academics now make the suggestion that coloured lights be installed in galleries to artificially project brown and black skin-tones onto the exhibits, just to make immigrants feel more at home when wandering amongst them, compulsively complaining about how racist everything is. When Nigeria agrees to paint some Tipp-Ex over the Benin Bronzes in return, I might feel a little more amenable towards the whole idea.
2. Why are Whiteboards So White?
In 2022, an academic paper was published in the snappily-titled U.S. journal of scientific pedagogy, Physical Review Physics Education Research, entitled ‘Observing Whiteness in Introductory Physics: A Case Study’. Here, insightful academics stood around staring at three students trying to solve a physics problem using a whiteboard, concluding that the whole shocking event proved once and for all that “Whiteboards can be racist like how housing, employment and the judicial systems were found to contain racist practices”, or at least they were found to do so once hard Leftists went deliberately looking for them in such areas, whether such things were actually present there or not.
According to the paper: “Whiteboards display written information for public consumption; they draw attention to themselves and in this case support the centring of an abstract representation and the person standing next to it, presenting. They collaborate with white organisational culture, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.”
If writing really does equate to whiteness, though, then how come we are constantly being told the entire skill was actually invented thousands of years ago by clever people like the ancient Sumerians, a brown-skinned race from the Middle East? Perhaps, as they wrote everything down on clay tablets in cuneiform, rather than on whiteboards, this just doesn’t count. Meanwhile, if white people went back to using old-fashioned blackboards once more, they would probably just end up being endlessly criticised for using white chalk to scribble on them again – probably sourced direct from the racist White Cliffs of Dover.
3. Why Are Government White Papers So White?
Last year, it surprisingly emerged that the traditional U.K. Government practice of naming a certain class of condensed official report as White Papers, after the specific colour of their covers, was yet another hideous manifestation of white supremacy. The practice had also since been adopted by the Canadian Government, you see, which was a form of disgraceful colour-based Civil Service Admin Department colonialism in action.
According to researchers at Canada’s National Sciences Engineering and Research Council (NSERC), as White Papers are generally considered to be the most authoritative ones, such “hierarchies inherent in the creation of White Papers are seen as artefacts of colonisation” and “are seen as exclusionary by some groups” of non-white total race-nutters, as “equating white with authority also implies superiority of peoples or individuals based on race”. It would seem that “Using [the word] ‘White’ as synonymous with authority is the antithesis of inclusion” and must be discontinued immediately, with the phrase ‘White Paper’ being replaced instead with something like ‘Position Statement’, in order “to heal from the past and support the process of reconciliation” with colonised indigenous Indians across Canada.
But what are the other, lesser types of paper the U.K. and Canadian Governments so wickedly tyrannise with their appalling paper-based racial hierarchies? Green and blue. So, which oppressed races in particular are White Papers racist against, then? Smurfs and Martians?
4. Why is White Paint So White?
In 2023, a whistleblower on public sector waste revealed to the world the astonishing fact that the Norwegian Government had been blowing around a million pounds of taxpayers’ kroner funding a multi-year academic project, ‘How Norway Made the World Whiter’ (‘NorWhite’ for short), devoted to demonstrating how, despite having no non-white colonies to speak of, Norway too had nonetheless helped colonise and enslave the entire non-white world. But how? By inventing a special kind of industrial-strength white paint, that’s how.
Desperate to daub themselves in white guilt, the self-hating academics responsible bemoaned how, “Aathough Norway is not a conventional colonial power”, as it had no colonies, it was still guilty of the crime of ethnically cleansing the world’s walls of all helpless brown, yellow and black shades and forcibly turning them hideously stale and pale nonetheless. The chemical compound titanium dioxide (TiO2) had first been synthesised by Norwegian chemists during the early 20th century, and then mass exported out to the world mixed in with a new, racially superior brand of white paint by the Norwegian manufacturing giants Titania AS and Kronos Titan – companies who, in order to help atone for their historic acts of literal racial whitewashing, had also helped contribute towards the contemporary Norwegian Government’s modern-day academic study of their crimes.
As putting non-toxic TiO2 in your paint made it longer-lasting and harder-wearing, as well as enabling it to resist discolouration and weathering, thus performing highly useful services like protecting metal from rust, the racist paint in question became highly popular. But, said the state- and industry-funded academics, there was a problem: although “not – at the time – considered chemically toxic, it created conditions for the emergence of attitudes toward colour that could be said to be socially toxic. These attitudes allowed hierarchies and dichotomies such as clean/filthy, modern/non-modern and civilised/primitive to materialise in everyday surfaces” like painted walls, furniture, ships, bridges and goalposts.
I’m pretty sure simple and common binary concepts such as “clean/dirty” existed prior to the invention of Norwegian white paint, you know – clearly the academics had never read Mary Douglas’s classic anthropological text Purity and Taboo, which traces the history of such ideas right the way back to ancient times in non-white lands like Africa and the Middle East. But then, Mary Douglas was a white person, so why bother reading any of that tedious old rubbish?
In the presiding academics’ bizarre and deluded view, Norway’s clean and pure TiO2 paint “played a globally leading role in establishing white as a superior colour”, and thus its appearance upon so many consumer products and furniture enabled whiteness to establish its “systemic spread” across our entire paint-colonised planet. Just like invisible demons in the mindset of an early Renaissance witch-hunter, or imaginary unseen germs in the mind of a paranoid Howard Hughes-type, “the inorganic compound hides in the food we eat, the paper we print on, the paint on the wall, as well as in concrete coatings, in synthetic textiles, tattoos, make-up, sunscreens and in endless amounts of white plastic products”.
Surely there is a problem here, though. I can’t pretend to have much in-depth, expert knowledge of the history of industrial chemistry myself, but I would strongly imagine the black-coloured, hard-wearing, rust-resistant, black paint equivalent of TiO2 white paint, whatever that may be, was also invented by white Western chemists, as the Industrial Revolution quite clearly happened in the white West, not in black Nairobi or brown Islamabad. As equally as many consumer items are likewise artificially coloured black via such means, doesn’t this balance things out rather?
ANSWERS:
- TRUE
- TRUE
- TRUE
- TRUE
Yes, that’s right, they’re all true, because this is 2024, four years after the death of George Floyd at the hands of whiteness (and some non-white, Hispanic and Asian-heritage policemen, although that particular awkward fact is very rarely publicised), and this is the mentally disturbed world we now live in.
If the CofE ever want to do some genuine good for their parishioners this Easter, maybe they could put an ad in a newspaper looking to hire a Reconstructing Whiteness Officer? They’d need to offer him a good salary, though, as, judging by the above cavalcade of total crap, he’d have quite a large job on his hands at present.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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