Saw this on twitter, I haven’t seen anything else about it. Is our government actually trying to find out if paint is racist, or are the Americans just being wrong?

15 comments

  4. So basically they’re saying that the marketing during the 1920s (!) alluded to white representing human purity, thus one can conclude a 100 years later that this was racist.

    Put like that it’s not far fetched, however spending 12 million kroner on such a conclusion is a vaste of time and brains (and definitely money)!

  5. I can do this way cheaper…

    For $1 000:

    >!White has been associated with purity because it’s hard to hide discoloration.!<

    For $10 000:

    >!If you kept your whites clean, it meant that you were cleanly person and could be trusted.!<

    For $100 000:

    >!In the 19th century, people began to develop silly racist ideas about white supremacy, based on skin color.!<

    Please PM me to get my Paypal address

  6. I mean it’s an academic grant from the government, idk why this is such a shocking concept. Is it a bit much… maybe? Funding academics has worked out pretty well for every civilization in history.

    Now if you’re gonna smoothbrain your way into falling for the headline that “white paint is racist,” there’s obviously no way to help you. They’re researching the the concept of whiteness and how Norwegian paint could have aided in that spread. Do we all know that the color white has been used for means of proclaiming racial superiority, yeah, does that mean that we can’t continue that discussion? This same research is done across the globe; this just has the unique lense of through Norwegian paint production.

    “The overall objective of NorWhite is to critically and visually investigate the cultural and aesthetic preconditions of a complex and unexplored part of Norwegian technology and innovation history that has—as this project claims—made the world whiter.”

    That took me a single google search to find. Historians aren’t going away, man. They’re gonna keep looking at the past and see how it affected our world as it is now. You can think it’s stupid, but you probably don’t have a Dr./Professor before your name and being that you took to reddit looking for someone to answer this instead of actually looking into the widely available information that exists for nearly every academic study ever done, it probably doesn’t mean that much to you anyways. Information is useful, always has been.

  7. This is not true, it is right wing nonsense.

    There is a 1.2 million to study the industrial production, art history and use/importance of titanium dioxide, a white pigment Norway produced from the early 1900’s and became an important in all kinds of industrial uses, from paint to additive in chewing gum and toothpaste etc. The ways products with the white pigment was marketed at the time is part of the study.

    Not exactly a study to find out if white paint is racist, but stupid people will believe anything they want to believe. I guess it makes life easier if you dumb something down until it sounds outrageous and is completely untrue.

  9. You really ought to be more skeptical when reading obviously crazy headlines like this one. Especially when they’re being presented by a crypto bro. I wouldn’t trust those guys to tell me my house was on fire.

  11. It’s amways depressing as someone working in science (even though completely different branch, medical research) to see how many people have apparently no understanding how science is conducted nowadays and are willing to fall for obviously BS-headlines of some right-wing twitter troll.

  12. Seems to be true. from another comment i made. feel free to correct me.

    >Honestly i have no idea what they are even trying to study at this point. It seems to have originated as a study to detail the history of titanium white production, a paint pigment made with Titanium oxide, invented in Norway. Known as the perfect white among paint pigments, replacing among others the toxic lead based white colored paint pigments.
    >
    >Somehow this “Culture scientist” shoehorned herself into the study and took it over. She apparently saw an easy buck on a privately funded study paid for by paint producers that later got over a million USD equivalent in government support after she went fucking nuts with the social justice angle. Presumably because it is all she knows, and because she now has to justify what she is doing on a study on the impact of the paint pigment on Norwegian history.

    You could argue the money is going to study the historic aspect of the paint, but honestly the funding is obscured to the point where we can’t tell. and they got the millions through government grants.

  15. Read what Sløseriombudsmannen says about this. Americans are not wrong, but it’s not all that they are doing. It has been said that wanting white paint is racist, but as in any case there is nuance. (Are the rest of you going to call me right-wing for not denying this story?)

Leave a Reply