Columbia professor’s book about “white paint” wins a National Book Award; argues paint connects to racial violence and erasure

# What happened Wendy Walters, a Columbia University professor, won a National Book Award for A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint. The book treats white paint as a meaningful cultural object rather than a neutral material, arguing it can signal erasure, exclusion, and power dynamics.

# Why Walters wrote the book Walters says the project began with a strong personal dislike of white paint. In a 2021 Creative Capital Foundation video she called that dislike "genuine and visceral." Rather than dismissing the feeling as irrational, she investigated how white paint appears in social and political contexts and connected it to patterns of violence and exclusion.

# Concrete examples Walters cites Walters uses contemporary incidents to show how white paint can accompany or perform acts of intolerance:

• In 2018, white paint was splashed outside the Rothko Chapel in Houston in an act tied to white supremacy.
• In 2021, white paint was used to deface a 100th anniversary memorial gallery honoring the Tulsa race massacre.
• A rainbow crosswalk for LGBTQIA+ persons in New Brunswick, Canada was painted over with white paint in an act Walters presents as intolerance.

She frames those and other instances as evidence that decorative or surface choices matter politically and can participate in erasure or masking of power.

# How the book has been received in this reporting Foundation's item, written by Mitch Kokai and citing Micaiah Bilger at the College Fix, presents the book and its award skeptically. That coverage calls the National Book Award a dubious prize and labels Walters' book a screed that attacks white paint as racist. The reporting focuses on the perceived oddity of an academic award going to a book centered on paint as a political subject.

# What the book claims (as summarized in publisher material) Publisher copy quoted in the reporting says the book "interrogates all that we have taken for granted about the substance that colors, or fails to color, the structures and objects that surround us—and what the collective impulse toward white paint can tell us about culture, politics, and individual desire." Walters aims to get readers to consider how practices of decoration and adornment might point to hidden narratives of power.

# What to watch next

# Short takeaway Walters' book reframes a commonplace material—white paint—as a lens for examining exclusion and power. Its National Book Award triggered skeptical coverage that questions both the premise and the prize.