A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint

*Minor damage to dust jacket

Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction

A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2026

An impassioned, boundary-pushing work of criticism traversing an array of subjects, from fine arts to design to architecture, taking aim at the ubiquity of white paint in our society and what its prevalence reveals about our values.

It's hard to identify a material that takes up more sensory space and has received less critical examination than white paint. As the default color of our built environment, it asks us to believe that it's neutral--that it has no signifiers or, perhaps more troublingly, that what it does signify, whether it be calmness, cleanliness, blankness, or purity, is unassailable and value-free. In this expansive, impassioned examination, cultural critic Wendy S. Walters 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.

Tracing the unquantifiable impact of white paint on our lived environment and in our collective imaginary, A Dead White braids together multiple narrative threads and associations. Exploring the role of white paint in art history, architecture, and consumer culture, it follows its influence into the home, the halls of the workplace, the galleries and studios of the contemporary art world, and larger forums of mass culture and national identity, never losing sight of how this cultural inclination manifests in our choices and habits as individuals. Deeply investigated and anchored by Walters's immediate sensory experiences and instincts, her intelligence and lucid prose ground this encompassing, utterly fresh work of cultural criticism.

Wendy S. Walters is the author of Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal, Troy, Michigan, and A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harper's, The Yale Review, BOMB, and others. She is a recipient of fellowships from Creative Capital, The Architectural League of New York, NYFA, and Mass MoCA. For The Metropolitan Museum of Art, she cocurated the exhibition Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast, which was called "a master class in presenting complicated, troubling art." She is an associate professor of nonfiction in the Writing Program of the School of the Arts at Columbia University.

Review Quotes:

"An interrogation [of] our culture and our relationship to the color white...more than just 'don't use white paint, ' it's about how the color white has become a language in and of itself that signifies a lot of things to different audiences." --NPR, "Here and Now"

"Part memoir, part design history, it is notable for its precise writing and its mood of existential unease. Imagine if Joan Didion were set on edge not by the Santa Ana winds but by office walls." --New York Times Style Section

"A vivid and vital argument about the unconscious noxious effects of a design choice so ubiquitous that it hardly registers as one." --Vulture

"If you allow this book to teach you how to read it, you'll find here an illuminating exercise in seeing beneath the bright, bland surfaces of our lives...a series of fluid reflections on what it means to become aware of the hues of a world streaked by racism and convulsed by violence." --Ron Charles

"In the days during and after reading the book, I found myself more aware of white paint, not just in the ubiquity of modern interiors or the way it occasionally coats the exteriors of old buildings, but in the way it reaches into other areas of life... A Dead White should have readers thinking broadly about the meanings and implications of white paint beyond it just being one choice among many on swatches of paint." --Archidose Substack w/John Hill

"Wendy S. Walters is one of our best--and strangest--living essayists. And I don't use the term essayist lightly, here: there are thousands of novelist-essayists, journalist-essayists, and poet-essayists out there exploring the form, some brilliant, some boring, but Walters is a true master of writing-as-thinking." --LitHub

"An engaging, erudite experiment...each example [Walters] contends with is masterfully described and meaningful in its own right...Recursive yet resounding, a carefully curated aesthetic journey." --Kirkus Reviews