The prestigious National Book Awards have many famous and acclaimed past winners, from Don DeLillo’s White Noise in 1985 to Alice Walker’s The Color Purple in 1983. Of those previous victors, only the latter could be allowed to win in 2026, as the color white is now officially racist.
The longlist for the National Book Foundation’s annual awards was announced last month, with one of the nominated nonfiction titles, Wendy S. Walters’ Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint, being published this week by Simon & Schuster. The book’s blurb describes it as an “impassioned, boundary-pushing work of criticism traversing an array of subjects” — but mainly the single, highly niche subject of white paint and why it is incredibly racist.
Beyond the Pale
The author is a black Columbia University writing professor and poet who has previously written books “imagining a black takeover of Norway” (through immigration, perhaps?). She first realized white paint was racist some years ago after becoming absolutely disgusted by “the frequency with which the walls of educational spaces are painted in white” as opposed to in luminous pink zig-zags with iridescent yellow polka-dots.
“It’s hard to identify a material,” continues the PR material, that “has received less critical examination than white paint.” (Maybe real academics were too busy studying materials like plutonium, graphene, silicon, or insulin.)
A blanconormative society, the authoress tells us, pretends that white paint is “neutral,” that it “has no signifiers,” and therefore is the natural background to national life across America, as white-skinned people were supposed to be, socially speaking, in the recent past. On the other hand, whenever Walters wishes to make the opposite argument, suddenly white paint morphs and becomes full of positive qualities like “calmness, “cleanliness,” and “purity.” She prejudicially imagines these qualities as shared by the white people who mixed and then daubed the paint.
The reasons for her “genuine and visceral dislike of white paint,” “a feeling” she “at times” finds “overwhelming,” are predictably strange. It turns out white paint, like Wite-Out or Liquid Paper, operates as an agent of white supremacy, insinuating itself “into systems of erasure, exclusion, violence, and the masking of power in the social and natural world,” as when vandals had used white paint to deface various monuments to diversity:
White supremacists splattered white paint at the entrance to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, a much-beloved non-sectarian site of cultural and artistic significance to the community in which it resides. The public outcry extended across the world. … A rainbow crosswalk affirming the welcome of LGBTQIA+ persons in Woodstock, New Brunswick, Canada, was painted over with white paint, rectangle by rectangle, and a huge splatter of white paint was left in the center to emphasize the act of intolerance.
Walters got an actual grant from the Creative Capital Foundation to write this thing. The award was described as “lucrative,” and Creative Capital grants can be up to $50,000. The grant was awarded way back in 2020. This means it must have taken her something like six years to write her screed about why white is the natural color of the Ku Klux Klan.
According to pre-publication reviews, the book isn’t entirely about why white paint is racist; it also deals with how the hue is complicit in acts of human rights abuse of all kinds. White is the natural color of torture chambers. Totalitarian regimes purportedly employ it in “white room torture,” locking victims inside a room painted all-white, with all-white furnishings and all-white clothing, and feeding them all-white foods to produce states of severe psychosis. (It is rumored some victims even begin to think they are real university professors, engaged in real academic disciplines.)
Hue and Crybaby
Inadvertently amusing promotional videos make Walters’ book sound like a kind of ultra-bizarre horror film, released just in time for Halloween:
When the paint starts speaking to you, it’s time to seek professional help. In old videos taken from the period of the book’s gestation, Professor Walters sounds like she needs it:
The stakes of “A Dead White” are high, life and death, containment or dispersal, regression or progress, forgetting and remembering. The stories of loss will gather in magnitude. My argument comes from a genuine and visceral dislike of white paint, a feeling that is at times overwhelming for me, and according to the estimations of others I know, a reaction that is possibly irrational.
More than “irrational,” Walters comes across as paranoid, seeing things in white paint that clearly are not there — and she’d like to make her readers paranoid and start seeing them alongside her, too:
I hope to encourage the reader to think about how practices of decoration and adornment might allude to hidden narratives of power … whether or not they recognize them as being so. … I have always been interested in systems, especially invisible ones, and the way that they shape our lives.
But maybe the reason why certain “systems” of “power” are invisible is that they’re not really there at all?
Paint a False Picture
Walters’ publishers describe her work as an “utterly fresh work of cultural criticism,” but this is not so. There have been several previous attempts to blacken white paint’s reputation, most notably in Norway where, in 2023, it was revealed the government had spent around a million dollars’ worth of taxpayer cash funding a multi-year pseudo-academic study, “How Norway Made the World Whiter,” or “NorWhite” for short. This argued that (perhaps to compensate for having no African or Asian colonies) the country had invented an industrial process for manufacturing special ultra-bright and hard-wearing brands of white paints, which had been used to “colonize” the planet’s walls instead.
The absurdly expensive Norwegian state-backed study in itself reveals the true problem here. It is not so much that crank people will insist upon writing crank books. People have always done that. It is more that supposedly sane persons in positions of authority now actively encourage and fund people to do so.
The irony of all this is, of course, that Wendy S. Walters’ own award-nominated crank book is, quite hypocritically, itself printed upon white paper. Utilizing her own pretentious mode of identitarian racial discourse, I could perhaps pen a text of my own, hypothesizing that the intimidatingly vast expanse of her white written page disgracefully privileges whiteness over blackness — before then advocating that, in this post-George Floyd era, we can turn this oppressive surface appearance around by observing that all the actual meaning resides in the blackness of the printed word, thereby redeeming it completely.
There. That should do. Can I have my National Book Award and $50,000 Creative Capital Award now, please?
Steven Tucker is a U.K.-based writer whose work appears regularly on both sides of the Atlantic. His latest book is "Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science."