"Colouring in the White Spaces": The Norm vs. the Other

I read an interesting excerpt of Beverley Ann Milne’s “Colouring in the White Spaces: Reclaiming Cultural Identity in Whitestream Schools” for another class. It struck a particular cord with me. In her work, she describes the example of teaching children how to colour in colouring books. An everyday occurrence, we don't notice the effect that we are having on children when we teach them that white is "the background." Of course, as children, they aren't sitting back and thinking "well...I need to colour in that person brown and that one yellow and that one I need to leave white" and the social implications that has. And colouring book companies are not inciting malice when they print off these "blank" (white) books. White is the easiest color to draw on, as every other colour shows up on it. 

So what is Milne's point within this metaphor? Well, it's the idea that white isn't another colour - it is the norm. Everything is white until we decide that it isn't. Until we decide that it is other.

What are the dangers of this?

Google offers up two main definitions for white:

• Of the colour of milk or fresh snow, due to the reflection of all visible rays of light; the opposite of black
• "A sheet of white paper"
• belonging to or denoting a human group having light-coloured skin (chiefly used of peoples of European extraction).
• "A white farming community"
• Synonyms: Caucasian, European, non-black
• "The early white settlers of Australia"

"The colour of milk or fresh snow"

Sounds pretty nice! But what about brown? Or black? What jumps to mind for those colours?

Brown: "of a colour produced by mixing red, yellow, and blue, as of dark wood or rich soil: 'an old brown coat.'"

(Brown isn't even its own colour now?)

Black: "of the very darkest colour owing to the absence of or complete absorption of light; the opposite of white...'black smoke'...synonyms: dark, pitch-black, as black as pitch, pitch-dark, jet-black, inky, etc."

Not as nice, huh? We as a society, over hundreds of years, have reduced each other to colours. Not only do we simplify thousands of years of migration and cultural significance to colours, we fail to recognize that white is a colour as well. Society views "white" as the norm, or as Milne describes it, "the background." We are taught, from a young age, to point out "the other," the "non-white" as set apart from the normal. This is a dangerous ideology and hinders social progress, because until we, as a majority in the society, as white people, include ourselves in this "colouring" and destroy the belief that other colours only show up against our background, we can never truly move forward to a world where all races are equal; a world without the existence of racism. 

Works Cited:

Milne, B A. 2013. Colouring in the White Spaces: Reclaiming Cultural Identity in Whitestream Schools. University of Waikato.

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     ging to or denoting any human group having dark-coloured skin, especially of African or Aus