The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

In case you doubted Conrad

Long pig

It came to mind when I was thinking we white people aren't really white, at all, but the same off-pink that used to be called "flesh-colored" and is a pretty good match for some kinds of pigs.

And I was thinking of that because Hawthorne uses whiteness as a metaphor for moral purity, as did even my Catholic Catechism so many decades ago that described sins as black stains on my white soul.

And of course there have been many people since then, white and non-white, to claim that usage was and is racist.

Not entirely true, but accurate at least as far as it is substantiated by the now pretty much defunct expression, uttered when someone does something good, "That was white of him," ordinarily used quite deliberately to bridge both meanings of "white" and tie them together in what is indeed a racist assertion in nearly any context.

Exception made for explicit and perhaps entirely accurate - and perhaps intentionally ironic - contrasting of the customary behavior of whites with that of non-whites in the sorts of literary contexts you are apt to encounter in Melville or Conrad, where the contrast would not be to the advantage of the whites.

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