For those of you dreaming of a white Christmas, here’s some advice: keep your thoughts to yourselves. Or at least select carefully who you share such sentiments with. That’s because there are some people today who even find the concept ‘white’ offensive and unacceptable.
For those of you dreaming of a white Christmas, here’s some advice: keep your thoughts to yourselves
Pantone has nominated a shade of white – ‘Cloud Dancer’ – as its 2026 ‘Colour of the Year’, describing it as ‘a symbol of calming influence in a frenetic society’. That alone would seem unremarkable, seeming to be just one of those harmless and inane corporate publicity ruses that emerge this time of year. But no. It’s caused outrage. Of course it has. Those itching to jump on their high horses are always on the lookout for a pretext to assert their moral superiority.
Pantone’s announcement prompted a deluge of denouncement from designers and political commentators, countless of whom have interpreted a mere marketing gimmick by a colour institute to be a grossly insensitive or even hostile act.
‘When white supremacy is resurfacing loudly in national leadership and policy, elevating “white” as the symbolic colour of the year feels painfully tone-deaf,’ said LGBT designer Mathew Boudreaux. Vanity Fair correspondent Jose Criales-Unzueta added: ‘After a year of efforts by the Trump administration and corporations to roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, alongside aggressive immigration crackdowns, it feels bold, and dare I say out of touch, to utter the words “white is the colour of 2026.”’ Washington Post reporter Rachel Kurzius also questioned the wisdom of the decision, in light of this being ‘a year filled with news about rising white nationalism.’
Leaving aside the veracity of the claim that this has been a year marked by the inexorable rise of white nationalism, a reasonable person might wonder: what causes such delicate souls to be so anguished by a mere word, or a concept associated with it?
The answer is that this is a generation and a demographic of people – affluent, middle-class, Western liberals – who have spent the past decade and more wallowing in the ideological mire of hyper-liberalism. This is a class who have been constantly hearing, and endless repeating into the ears of each other, the word ‘white’ in an exclusively negative context. It’s invariably and inevitably used before such words as ‘privilege’, ‘colonialism’, ‘oppression’ or ‘racism’. Indeed, the word plays a central role in the ideology and demonology of hyper-liberalism itself. One of wokery’s core, topsy-turvy tenets is that white people can’t help being bad, hence once of its favourite terms of opprobrium: ‘whiteness’.
Thus, there’s nothing more inflammatory to the minds of the hyper-vigilant, hyper-liberal than using the word ‘white’ in any context that is not overtly diabolising. They have spent so long immersed in the own world and esoteric language codes that they no longer recognise that white can be just a colour (or not even a colour at all, strictly speaking).
Poor old Pantone. The corporation made the mistake in thinking a hue is just that. Perhaps it had even believed the headlines that ‘woke is dead’. Its vice president Laurie Pressman insists the decision had nothing to do with skin pigmentation. ‘Skin tones did not factor into this at all,’ she told the Washington Post.
Yet nothing is simple for a demographic which owes so much of its worldview to woke ideology. This is a way of thinking that has its roots in, among other thinking, the school of semiotics deriving from Roland Barthes, one which sees meaning and significance in all innocuous symbols and cultural phenomena, and a paranoid strain of philosophy derived from Foucault, which sees invisible and malevolent power structures everywhere. And these people are paranoid. They perceive malicious intent where there is none, because they have grown so monomaniac and cloistered themselves.
‘Colour choices don’t exist in a vacuum – they reflect who was in the room, whose perspectives were missing, and what messages get unintentionally reinforced,’ says Boudreaux. That reaction is pure wokery. Nothing exists in a vacuum, nothing can be innocent or neutral. Everything reflects the subconscious – and by default, untrustworthy – intent of others.
Wokery sees bad actors everywhere, because it thinks everyone is ruled by their wicked subconscious. Wokery is fixated with words and their supposed omnipotence, which is why hyper-liberals hate anyone using them in an ‘inappropriate’ fashion or in ways not approved by them.
If the colour white does have a ‘meaning’, that is entirely dependent on cultural context and upon the eye of the beholder. For we in the West it has historically symbolised purity. In China it has traditionally been associated with death. Yet for a certain modern-day demographic, whose mental faculties have been diseased by a contemporary ideology, the colour white signifies white supremacy. Naturally.
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