Mama Don’t Take My Chromophobia Away

Pantone’s 2026 Color of the Year is Cloud Dancer, a snowy hue “whose aerated presence acts as a whisper of calm and peace in a noisy world.” Pantone promotes the shade as a “lofty white” and a clean slate in a time of unrest, but Lida Zeitlin-Wu argues that Cloud Dancer is not a refuge but instead an embrace of the status quo. In this incisive essay, she traces how color—like most everything else—has been privatized and monetized, and why Pantone’s supposedly neutral choice is politically charged, participating in a history of whiteness sold as purity, innocence, and order.

Cloud Dancer’s implications of whiteness as part of an aspirational lifestyle inevitably raised alarm bells. Journalists and social media users were quick to zero in on the questionable optics of choosing white at this political moment, when white nationalism is essentially mainstream and ICE is openly abducting and murdering people in broad daylight. Some writers described Cloud Dancer as “tone-deaf.” There were more than a few KKK jokes, leading to parody memes like “Klantone” and “Klan Hood White.” One journalist suggested it was a recession indicator: could Cloud Dancer be somehow emblematic of the skyrocketing price of eggs (also white)? Others went further still, speculating that, far from being politically oblivious, the pale tint was actually rage-bait, designed to provoke strong negative reactions—and thus increased online engagement—from progressives. “Bitch, do you mean white?” comedian Amber Ruffin riffed on Late Night with Seth Meyers.“White’s the color of every year. White was the color of 1988. White was the color of 793 to 1066 AD” (cue image of Vikings).