Is White Paint Racist?

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According to Norwegian academics, “whiteness” and “white supremacy” are terms to take literally, and the colour white, in particular the white paint that is so commonly used on Norwegian houses, equals racism. Had it been the first of April, I would have assumed this was a hoax, but alas this is serious, state-funded stuff.

From the research project ‘How Norway Made the World Whiter (NorWhite)’ co-authored by Ingrid Haland, an associate professor at the University of Bergen, we learn that:

Whiteness is one of today’s key societal and political concerns. Within and beyond academia worldwide, actions of revolt and regret seek to cope with our racial past. In the pivotal works in whiteness studies within art and architecture history, whiteness is understood as cultural and visual structures of privilege. The new research project ‘How Norway Made the World Whiter’ (NorWhite) funded by the Research Council of Norway (12 million NOK), addresses a distinctively different battleground for politics of whiteness in art and architecture. Two core premises underpin the project: Whiteness is not only a cultural and societal condition tied to skin colour, privileges, and systematic exclusion, but materialise everywhere around us. Second, one cannot understand this materialisation without understanding the societal, technological and aesthetic conditions of the colour itself.

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This state-funded project (everything in Norway is state-funded, by the way) goes on to say that it will show how Norway, although not a “conventional colonial power” (what’s an unconventional colonial power?), has nevertheless “played a globally leading role in establishing white as a superior colour”. {snip}

“Until now, however, this story has been lesser known to scholars and the public,” the description reads. {snip}

NorWhite will connect the challenging topics: whiteness, technological innovation, and mass-exploitation of natural resources in a single case study. The research project will study the Norwegian innovations the chemical compound titanium dioxide (TiO2) and the white pigment titanium white in a historical, aesthetic, and critical lens – focusing on how the innovations transformed surfaces in art, architecture, and design – in order to show how aesthetic – and thereby societal – transformation is driven by technological development.

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Some might say it’s rather arrogant to assume that Norway painted the world white, but it’s true that the origins of modern, white paint are Norwegian. As the authors say, the process of making white paint with a far better coverage than previously obtained was invented in 1916 by two Norwegian chemists, Dr Peder Farup and Dr Gustav Jebsen (incidentally, a relative of mine). But rather than taking pride in this achievement, the study seeks to problematise and degrade it. I have no reason to believe Drs Farup or Jebsen were white supremacists simply for discovering a chemical method that separated the iron and titanium in the mineral ilmenite to produce pure, non-toxic white paint, but then I don’t have the creative imaginations of Whiteness Studies scholars.

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The project is curiously also receiving funding from Titania AS and Kronos Titan, the companies that pioneered the production of white paint starting in the 1920s. {snip}

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