I’ve been saying for years that white paint is racist and that everything should be painted BLACK to show solidarity with slavery and the Holocaust and so on.
Finally, someone is listening to me.
Is white paint racist? Norway’s University of Bergen is exploring that question, asking how the aesthetic of white paint helped the nation contribute to white supremacy and helped “[make] the world whiter.”
“Whiteness is not only a cultural and societal condition tied to skin color, privileges, and systematic exclusion, but materialize everywhere around us,” a rundown of the study read.
“Although Norway is not a conventional colonial power, this project will show how the country has played a globally leading role in establishing white as a superior color,” it said. “Until now, however, this story has been lesser known to scholars and the public.”
The study on whiteness and paint, dubbed NorWhite, observes the Norwegian-developed paint pigment titanium white through “historical, aesthetic, and critical” lenses to determine how the development of the color contributed to “social transformation” as well as how the innovation led to “planetary consequences.”
Ingrid Halland, Ambassador of The Science (we’re going to paint her face and hair BLACK)
“Currently the Norwegian innovation TiO2 [titanium dioxide] is present in literally every part of modern life … The primary research question is: What are the cultural and aesthetic changes instigated by titanium white and TiO2 surfaces — and how can both the material in itself and these changes be conceptualized and made visible?” the description asks.
The Research Council of Norway, a government agency, is funding the study by University of Bergen associate professor and historian Ingrid Halland through a grant of 12 million Norwegian Krone (about $1.2 million US) to explore the paint color’s historical legacy, its origins in Norway, and features images of several of the nation’s buildings plastered in the color.
“The overall objective of NorWhite is to critically and visually investigate the cultural and aesthetic preconditions of a complex and unexplored part of Norwegian technology and innovation history that has — as this project claims — made the world whiter,” the description concluded.
The study is also sponsored by two of the major companies that contributed to titanium white paint’s prevalence in the country — Titania A/S, which extracts ore for use in titanium-based products, and Kronos Titan, which produces the titanium dioxide pigment.
I would like to visit Norway and help with this project of painting everything BLACK.
I think they also need to black out the sky, to keep things from looking light-colored in the sun.
Let’s hope Norway funds this next