Whitewashing and the zealous pursuit of white garments is at the heart of this chapter, a phenomenon entangled with race thinking and a whiteness agenda. This phenomenon grew from the 1600s, altering trade and labour regimes and the need for skilled care Atlantic-wide. This soap saga directed domestic and personal priorities and employed legions of women, typically low-ranked, gendered and racialized. Light, white shirts and shifts carried cultural weight, understood as the social skin. The chapter argues for the skill and stamina inherent in whitewashing, a sector overlooked until recently, demanding attention not least for the colonial dimensions of this history. Whether Hudson Bay or the Caribbean, soap stood out as a colonial feature. The Caribbean was unique in economic and cultural power, where Black women directed the making and remaking of fashion. I present the history of enslaved and free Caribbean washerwomen, with arguments for their cultural force and essential functions. Allied with Black seamstresses, they built a dynamic fashion ecology that informed Atlantic norms. This cohort defied reductionist claims, even as imperial thinking celebrated all things White.

This chapter examines the interconnectedness of whiteness, gender, and national identity in Hollywood movies. It begins with Birth of a Nation, Hollywood’s first blockbuster and its original sin. It then turns to films that bookend the Classical era – The Jazz Singer (1927) and The Searchers (1956) – to illustrate how much of the ideology put on screen in Birth of a Nation became profitable subject matter and generic habit in the studio era. It then turns to Rocky (1976), examining the centrality of Hollywood in shaping the racial ideology of colorblindness in the decades after the civil rights movement. The chapter concludes by discussing what the author calls Hollywood’s white racial imaginary, a critical framework that allows for a more adequate diagnosis of the implications of the machinations of whiteness in contemporary Hollywood.

The book’s final chapter is a nuanced study of how political screening engaged with and altered German memory, identity, and community, as well as the national process of coming to terms with the Nazi past. This research challenges the traditional single-frame interpretation of denazification by revealing how many respondents, especially those complicit with Nazism, actively used political screening for their own benefit. It views the questionnaire as a rich and revealing record of autobiography. The emotional annotations written into Fragebögen are a window into the mind of the common German citizen and a means to understand individual mental processing of the Nazi era. This chapter argues that men and women undergoing political investigation were not passive subjects of a mandatory denazification program, but active and engaged participants who used the questionnaire, consciously and subconsciously, for their own benefit. The Fragebogen was therefore not simply a bureaucratic screening instrument of the occupying armies, but also an unintended emancipatory device that gave voice to Germans, inviting them to participate in the determination of their own fate.