Vermont Life, Volume 23, Issue 2, page 27
"White on white on white..."
Half a year after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 into law, Vermont Life Magazine published an article in their Winter 1968 issue entitled “White on White is Winter’s Theme.” Though the article refers predominantly to the whiteness of the snow that blankets the Vermont Landscape in the winter, this article can also be read as a metaphor for Vermont Life Magazine’s overwhelming representation of whiteness as a socially constructed racial category and its centrality in representing Vermont as a cultural space.
As we have seen in many of the articles and images preceding this one, whiteness is often represented as so natural that it can often be rendered invisible, perhaps particularly to white readers. Yet, in this article, whiteness as a symbol is foregrounded - “white on white” refers to the snowfall on an already snowy landscape, but visually, it represents the white bodies that navigate the snowy landscape.
Skiers, farmers, and white school children on sleds are represented on every page, as we can see in the examples above. These types of representation send implicit messages about who is culturally imagined to belong in such places. If these bodies were not so uniformly white, would “white” still be winter’s theme?
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In conclusion, images such as these generate stories of exclusion through what they do not mention in the face of overwhelming civil rights-related events transpiring at the time. The repeated ignoring on non-white people in these issues demonstrates the power deployment and representation have in generating and sustaining cultural meaning through erasure. Though any assumption of intent on Vermont Life's part may be problematic here, the impact of articles such as these is a significant instance of reassertion of the American Cultural Imaginary as white, rural and traditional in ways that erase many opportunities for belonging.
