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Guest post by Al Ballesteros
Portland - Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow with the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution, warned me. Then your Contributing Editor sent me an article about the book “White Paint,” which just entered the process for potentially winning a National Book Award.. Sometimes an argument needs only a day to find its illustration. Your correspondent has taken several Hillsdale College online courses with Professor Hanson. What a pleasure. In my mind he belongs with Thomas Sowell and a handful of others whose voices of reason the country needs, loudly and clearly.
Professor Hanson spoke again recently at the Heritage Action Sentinels Summit in Orlando, Florida, last weekend. He spoke about defending American freedoms, values and institutions. One thought stayed with me: the left has captured most of our institutions, and our prestigious awards from those institutions are no longer prestigious.
Hanson has made that case for years. In essays on American higher education, he has warned readers not to assume that prestigious institutions remain excellent simply because their names once meant excellence. That idea was still in my head when I left Orlando. Then my friend Ed Vidal of The Miami Independent sent me an article from The College Fix. It was about white paint. Not painting the living room. Not eggshell versus satin. White paint—and what it is said to mean in an upcoming book.
Wendy Walters, Associate Professor of Nonfiction Writing at Columbia University, has a forthcoming book, A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint (Scribner, due out on October 13, 2026). Columbia describes the book as a tour through art history, architecture and consumer culture that examines white paint in our “collective imaginary.” In a 2021 talk, she said that her research led her to examples in which white paint figured in systems of erasure, exclusion, violence and concealed power. She has tenure, and therefore lifetime employment, at Columbia University.
The National Book Foundation long-listed the book for the 2026 National Book Award in Nonfiction. A longlist is recognition. It is not the prize. Finalists and a winner come later. The argument does not require a trophy. It only requires that a prestigious prize machinery treated this subject as serious literature.
Professor Hanson, I believe that I have Exhibit A. The question is not whether a professor may write a book about white paint. In a free country, write whatever book you please. The question is prestige. A famous university. A celebrated award process. An academic title. A cultural institution. Those names once meant something because earlier generations built reputations for rigor behind them. When Harvard, Columbia, a Pulitzer Prize or a Nobel Prize appeared beside a work, people assumed serious standards had been applied. Prestige is not permanent. It is inherited capital.
When institutions reward ideology more readily than excellence, people notice. When they stop trusting the institution’s judgment, the institution has spent something hard to recover: its credibility. That is Hanson’s larger warning. The university name remains. The award brand remains. The title remains. Even the ceremony remains. The prestige does not.
My father was a young international-law professor in the 1970s. Organizations such as the United Nations and prizes such as the Nobel Peace Prize meant a great deal to me then. Those names helped send me into international service. Then, in 2009, a recently elected President Obama—who had not yet done much in office—received the Nobel Peace Prize. I saw then what I had not seen before. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
Nearly two decades later the pattern is harder to deny. Given that the woke progressive left has captured the commanding heights of cultural institutions, many of our prestigious awards stopped functioning as guarantees of excellence. Professor Hanson left me thinking about that in Orlando. A day later, fellow Heritage Action Sentinel Ed Vidal sent me an article about a book on white paint. Sometimes the illustration arrives quickly. Thanks, Ed. Thanks, Professor Hanson. Thanks, Dad.
