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Larry

Spotted in the window display of Bulldog News: a magazine called white. Now that you have caught our attention, let's look a little closer. It has a white couple on it. They appear to be in love. He has her in his arms. She is really laughing hard; he is laughing too, but not as hard. She can expect to laugh a lot with him for the rest of her life. This must be paradise. He is handsome. She is pretty. Her teeth are as white as pearls. White-capped mountains are in the distance. A white sky is above them. They are white.

But white magazine is not about white culture but wedding culture. It has the mission of bringing "meaning back into marriage." Indeed, the founders of the magazine appear to be politically progressive. One "spent many years as a youth worker at a number of organisations including the Samaritans and Juvenile Justice." Both believe in building community. They saw the need to "bring something deeply meaningful and positive into the wedding space." They also have it in mind that a marriage should be "as beautiful as the wedding day."

Fine. Fine. Fine. We get it. This drabbest of middle-class institutions can be more than what it is: a contract. It can can be spiritual like Buddhism or artistic like a painting. But the magazine is still called white, and we live in times when it would not be at all surprising to find a magazine called that that's about white people having the best time ever. In the age of Trump (American's first white president), the innocence of white is just not possible. It can only explode in our faces.