WOW!! This is so excellent!!! And worth posting again. The depth of truth, wisdom, heart and meaning illuminated here is something that I am so grateful for! And it is so needed! Thank you, Cristina Breshears! — Molly
I’ve been thinking about Pantone’s “Cloud Dancer” and the quiet violence of a blank slate and would be interested in your thoughts. You might have seen that Pantone released its Color of the Year a few days ago: Cloud Dancer, a “lofty white,” which the company describes as “a calming influence for a society rediscovering the value of quiet reflection.”
And I’ll be honest: I felt my whole body recoil. White? Now? After the year we’ve lived?
After white supremacist symbolism has flooded our public life in the political arena, in ICE uniforms, in courtrooms, in the armed normalization of white fear, and in the coded aesthetics of pop culture?
Pantone presented us with white, asserting that it implied “purity, reflection, healing.” I don’t think Pantone meant harm. But this is how cultural messaging works: through the quiet power of unexamined metaphors that shape our sense of who belongs, who is centered, and whose suffering gets painted over (whitewashed?) for the sake of an aesthetic mood board.
Language doesn’t live in a vacuum. It has been shaped by centuries of Christian and colonial imagery (light versus darkness, heaven versus earth, purity versus corruption, good versus evil) that also reinforced racial hierarchies and colorism in all its shades: white, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon…with whiteness always elevated. In Western culture, whiteness has long been equated with purity, peace, virtue, innocence, order, light, lofty aspiration, even holiness; while darkness has been equated with danger, corruption, evil, sin, chaos, and backwardness.
So, when a global brand presents white as the color of healing in a year marked by racial division, democratic erosion, anti-immigrant policy, and supremacist symbolism, it isn’t neutral, soothing, or calming. It is tone deaf in the most literal sense: deaf to tone, deaf to history, deaf to context. And it becomes complicit in the harm.
The description of Cloud Dancer alone reveals everything: “a color of calming influence .. quiet reflection .. lofty white.” White is once again being used as a moral metaphor. As transcendence. As reset. As the place we go when we want a “start fresh.” But why is newness always imagined as whiteness?
Even the people defending the choice (mostly white voices) reach reflexively for phrases like:
• “White contains all colors.”
• “It’s a blank slate!”
• “You’re being too sensitive.”
• “Everything is not about race.”
But color-blindness is never neutral. Color-blindness sounds egalitarian, but it denies the specificity of lived experience of Black, brown, Indigenous, and queer communities whose realities aren’t interchangeable shades in a spectrum. Color-blindness erases. When we imagine “new beginnings” as white, we keep reinforcing the idea that whiteness equals purity and possibility which is the same worldview that erased and marginalized so many people in the first place. Color-blindness is what you resort to when your own comfort depends on not seeing what others cannot avoid.
A blank slate is not white. Real slate is gray. Mineral rich. Dense. Often nearly black. A slate is born of heat and compression and shaped by tectonic shifts under pressure, a more intense and emergent process than the mere act of presenting the purity of a white surface with an invitation to write things anew. We write on slate not because it is empty, but because it is durable enough to hold the truth of what we inscribe.
The idea that beginnings must be white is an aesthetic fiction, one with centuries of cultural force behind it. It reinforces the belief that cleanliness, virtue, and “fresh starts” belong to whiteness.
But here is the truth that every gardener, astrophysicist, midwife, mystic, and artist knows: Everything begins in the dark. Seeds rupture underground. Galaxies form in blackness. Night precedes dawn. The womb is shadow. Even on a white page, it is the black ink that reveals the word.
Darkness is not a void. It is an incubator of potential. It is a cradle.
"In the beginning it was darkness then came light."
Black and brown people bristled at Pantone’s choice not because they “read too much into it,” but because they have spent generations forced to read the world as it actually is. A world where white is not an innocent color. Where white has been: the pointed hood; the robe; the picket fence; the protestor’s placard against progress; the jury box; the school board rewriting history or sublimating history; and the policy language coded as “safety” or “purity” or “returning to traditional values.”
When the Color of the Year is white in a year when white nationalism openly courts power, it cannot be divorced from the landscape into which it enters. And when white apologists say, “there are more important things to talk about,” I want to ask: More important to whom?
Because it’s worth remembering that symbolism is not superficial. Symbols are how cultures metabolize meaning. If companies can profit from aesthetics, then communities can critique the ideology those aesthetics unconsciously reinforce.
The thinkers defending Pantone’s choice by calling white a “blank page for the future” mean well. I understand the instinct toward reimagining, rewriting, rebuilding. Mercy. In the midst of our resistance, we need to imagine what we can create from the wreckage. But even that metaphor (the new page, the clean canvas) is “white” by default.
And maybe it’s time we reject that default setting entirely. What if we re-imagined newness not as bleaching, but as composting? Because the world we need won’t be built on blankness. It will be forged in complexity. In the mixture. In the layers. In the gray of slate. In the black of soil. In the full, luminous spectrum of humanity. The world doesn’t need a “lofty white” to heal. It needs colors that remember. Colors with depth, mixture, and history.
Beginnings are not clean. They are messy, shadowed, fertile, wild. They happen in the dark. And the dark is good.
So, here’s my take: Pantone’s choice of white is not the crisis. It’s the symptom. A reminder that even in moments of national reckoning, the cultural imagination still reaches instinctively toward whiteness as purity, white space as calm, white surfaces as beginnings.
But we don’t heal by bleaching what hurts. We heal by seeing it. And we are not blank pages. We are constellations, histories layered on histories, pigments deepened by experience, stories written in a hundred hues. Calling whiteness the color of renewal doesn’t transcend racism. It quietly repeats it.
The future we need will not be painted on white. It will rise, just as it always has, from the dark.
No comments:
Post a Comment