Whitewashing

“ If the angels, when they finished their work on the Cathedral, had left a whitewash brush behind them, they would have done the city a real service. The houses, inside and out, and occupants too, and the reputation of its men from olden time, all need whitewashing. ”

“ By the bye, a fair lady, whose opinion, in most matters of taste, I hold in the deepest reverence, recently became a convert to this doctrine of Mr Wordsworth, because she noticed the effect just instanced, not when gazing upon a landscape, but when compiling patch work in which fragments of white intruded amongst the blues, yellows, greens, reds, and neutrals, woefully disturbed the harmony and repose of the cushion cover or quilt. Mr Wordsworth says also, in support of his anti-whitewashing theory, that “in nature, pure white is scarcely ever found but in small objects, such as flowers ”

“ In a hundred other cases the same truth could be illustrated; the situation in which the black man first assumes that all mankind is black, and then accuses the rest of the artificial vice of painting their faces red and yellow, or the hypocrisy of whitewashing themselves after the fashion of whited sepulchres. ”

“ The colors which absorb heat most readily are black and purple. White is one of the best protections by reason of its reflective power. A whitewashing of the branches of the trees and in fact of all the tree has been practiced with some success as retarding the early bloom of the buds. Elaborate studies of this method of treatment have been carried on by the Missouri station, and it has been developed that there is a considerable difference between the temperature of whitewashed and unwhitewashed peach twigs. ”

“ BLEACHING, the process of whitening or depriving objects of colour, an operation incessantly in activity in nature by the influence of light, air and moisture. The art of bleaching, of which we have here to treat, consists in inducing the rapid operation of whitening agencies, and as an industry it is mostly directed to cotton, linen, silk, wool and other textile fibres, but it is also applied to the whitening of paper-pulp, bees’-wax and some oils and other substances. ”

“ Look at the hundreds of advertised hair-dyes, used for the purpose of changing Nature! See men with their gray beards dyed black; women with those beautiful [Pg 388] black locks, which but yesterday were as white as the driven snow! Not only this, but even those with light or red whiskers run to the dye-kettle, steal a color which Nature has refused them, and an hour after curse the negro for a complexion that is not stolen. If black is so hateful, why do not gentlemen have their boots whitewashed? If the slaves of the South had been white, the same prejudice would have existed against them. ”

“ This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. ”

“ The supposed necessity of rough-cast to keep out rain in houses not built of hewn stone or brick, has tended greatly to injure English landscape, and the neighbourhood of these Lakes especially, by furnishing such apt occasion for whitening buildings. That white should be a favourite colour for rural residences is natural for many reasons. The mere aspect of cleanliness and neatness thus given, not only to an individual house, but, where the practice is general, to the whole face of the country, produces moral associations so powerful, that, in many minds, they take place of all others. ”

“ I may here express my opinion in passing that the white colour of the skin is not natural to man, but that by nature he has a black or brown skin, like our forefathers the Hindus; that consequently a white man has never originally sprung from the womb of Nature, and that thus there is no such thing as a white race, much as this is talked of, but every white man is a faded or bleached one. Forced into this strange world, where he only exists like an exotic plant, and like this requires in winter the hothouse, in the course of thousands of years man became white. ”

“ While philosophers assert that they have succeeded in producing white light by the combination of lights of the [162] various colors, for which combination, however, they give no formula, no dyer with the greatest patience and with the most subtile proportioning of dyestuffs, giving pure reproductions of the primary colors as seen in the spectrum or image of the broken sunbeam, can ever be able to produce anything of a color approaching white. But every dyer knows how to produce white by bleaching, that is, by the destruction of all color. ”

“ An argument is unsound when it proves too little or too much, or when it proves nothing. If color is an offense, it is so, entirely apart from the manhood it envelops. There must be something in color of itself to kindle rage and inflame hate, and render the white man generally uncomfortable. If the white man were really so constituted that color were, in itself, a torment to him, this grand old earth of ours would be no place for him. ”

“ A is white and finds it necessary to whitewash B, who is black: after several years of hopeless grey, A finds that he has indeed put some very satisfactory daubs of whitewash all over B, but that his own coat has been blackened in the course of the struggle. ”

“ When white deteriorates in hue, its place is usually taken by a dirty tone of yellow, whilst the yellow discoloured tinge of wool is the bane of many departments of textile manufacture, necessitating expensive bleaching operations. It is likewise the colour of the fading leaf and denotes decaying life in the vegetable world. ”

“ Of course, it is absurd to imagine that white gets dirty sooner than any colour: it simply shows the dirt more. From the dust of the surrounding air, and from contact with dirty surfaces the clothes take up constantly a certain amount of impurity; but besides this outside dirt, they absorb a great deal of those refuse matters from our bodies, of which I spoke in the second chapter. Every day over two pints of dirty water pass through the pores of our skins in the form of sensible and insensible perspiration. ”

“ The whitewash is gone from the negro cabins now; and many, possibly most, of the big mansions, once so shining white, have worn out their paint and have a decayed, neglected look. It is the blight of the war. ”

“ They sap and destroy the upward tendencies of the poorer whites. The latter, instead of always having something better to look at and strive after, have a lower standard of living, health, and cleanliness set before them, and the results are disastrous. They sink to the lower level of the Asiatics, and the degrading tendency proceeds upward by saturation, affecting several grades of society.... There is an insidious, yet irresistible, process of social degradation. The colored race does not intentionally, or even consciously, lower the European ”

“ She believes in white apparel, as angels ought to do—white window blinds and knickerbockers, white wide-awakes and sun-shades, white fish, white bread, white pulpy fruit, or as near that colour as possible, and white curtains and covers.
And Hygeia is right. Why should we keep such big fires and jets of lambent gas in the dog-days, consuming the life-giving oxygen, and yet complain of being overheated? He would be a plucky man who dare ride through public streets with white unmentionables, coat and vest, and white umbrella, on a white horse. ”

“ Some bring in clothes, to be sure, because the white man asks it; but why no sensible man could say. They are hung from one shoulder, flap merrily in the breeze, and are always quite frankly tucked up about the neck or under the arms when the wearer happens to be in haste. As a matter of fact these savages are so beautifully and smoothly formed; their red-brown or chocolate-brown skin is so fine in texture, and their complete unconsciousness so genuine that in an hour the newcomer is quite accustomed to their nakedness. ”

“ 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. The Middle Age regarded skin color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth century we were hammering our national manikins into one, great, Universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even more than birth. Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful! ”

“ When their faces are washed, a circumstance of rare occurrence, they are as white as the average of white people who are exposed to an out-of-door life. It is not the practice of the aborigines of either sex to wash themselves with water. They are sometimes seen to besmear their faces and hands with oil, which they carefully wipe off with a wisp of dry grass, or other substitute for the towel of civilization. ”

“ Further, it is not generally held that in the human family a white skin is a decided mark of degradation, but rather the reverse; and yet nothing can be more certain than that the Negro fœtus has a white skin. ”

“ No touch of whitewash had been spread over either house, or fence, or outbuilding, for many years, though lime is known to everybody as being one of the surest preservers of wood-work, as well as the very cheapest, while it so beautifully sets off a farm-house to see its surroundings covered once a year with a fresh coat of white. The hen-house was of course equally neglected, though whitewash is so well known to be an indispensable purifier of such places, materially helping to keep away those kinds of vermin that prevent poultry from thriving. ”

“ BLEACHING
217. The beauty and the commercial value of uncolored fabrics depend upon the purity and perfection of their whiteness; a man's white collar and a woman's white waist must be pure white, without the slightest tinge of color. But all natural fabrics, whether they come from plants, like cotton and linen, or from animals, like wool and silk, contain more or less coloring matter, which impairs the whiteness. ”

“ The common system of washing followed by drying in the sun, adopted by the ancients, is a process which of itself, by frequent repetition, decolorises the raw materials of textile fabrics, and thus must inevitably have taught them the art of ‘natural bleaching’ of a character similar to that practised in Europe up to a comparatively very recent period. And this appears, according to the authority of ancient authors, to have been the case. Washing or steeping in alkaline and ammoniacal lyes, or in milk of lime, followed by exposure in the sun, formed the chief basis of their system ”

“ Whiteness was a lie.
He got up and walked through the room. The glitter of the sunlight came insolently from the whiteness, and the room was filled with its lying shimmer. He hated it.
He stopped and listened and his eyelids twitched. Something floated before his mind, knocked at its door—not so much a forgotten thing as one suppressed and throttled. From his trousers pocket he drew forth a round, tightly-rolled, blackish brown object. He looked at it and began to shudder. For a moment his eyes had the same brooding look as when he regarded the chessmen. ”

“ During a large portion of the year, and just when the struggle for existence is most severe, white is the prevailing tint of nature, and dark colours will be the most conspicuous. The white varieties will now have an advantage; they will escape from their enemies or will secure food, while their brown companions will be devoured or will starve; and as “like produces like” is the established rule in nature, the white race will become permanently established, and dark varieties, when they occasionally appear, will soon die out from their want of adaptation to their environment. ”

“ How willingly would one swish the harmless whitewash over more than half the colour—over all the chocolate and all the blue—with which the buildings of the world are stained! You could not wish for a better, simpler, or fresher harmony than whitewash makes with the slight sunshine and the bright grey of an English sky.
The grey-stone, grey-roofed monastery looks young in one sense—it is modern; and the friars look young in another—they are like their brothers of an earlier time. ”

“ If, then, the prevalence of white coloration is generally associated with some deficiency in the acuteness of the most important senses, this colour becomes doubly dangerous; for it not only renders its possessor more conspicuous to its enemies, but at the same time makes it less ready in detecting the presence of danger. Hence, perhaps, the reason why white appears more frequently in islands, where competition is less severe and enemies less numerous and varied. ”

“ Observe attentively: that white which surprizes thee so much, is a thin coat of arsenic or white lead, laid on with art, and in a manner glued to the skin. This is a despicable custom in any other nation; but, among the countrywomen of Eugenia, it is absolutely criminal, seeing that, by its adoption, they injure and tarnish their natural whiteness, that surprizing whiteness which excites the envy of all the other ladies in the world. ”

“ Since they've put us in whites I go around with the washer-woman's complaint most of the time. Terrible shooting pains in my back! My sympathy for the downtrodden is increasing by leaps and bounds. I can picture myself without any effort of the imagination bending over a tub after the war doing the family washing while my wife is out running for alderman or pulling the wires to be appointed Commissioner of the Docks. The white clothes situation, however, is serious. ”