ABSTRACT
Winthrop C. Jordan provides a culturalist account of the white-over-black encounter between the English and Africans in the sixteenth century. In contrast to Jordan, Tzvetan Todorov suggests that the white-over-black value judgment is virtually universal. James Hillman identifies three primary associations to the color white: heaven, divinity, and spirituality; innocence, purity, and perfection; femininity, effeminacy, and vulnerability. Racists believe that blackness has an essentially negative value. They seem to employ a certain syllogism: blackness has a negative value; some people have black skin; therefore, all people who have black skin have a negative value. Traditional color theory considers some colors "primary" and others "secondary," "tertiary," and so forth. The chapter discusses various associations of whiteness with objects and, in the process, subverts any notion that whiteness has an essentially positive value. The perception of color is relative to the immediate physical context of the color—that is, relative to the other color or colors around it.
