[Fountain] penning whiteness as the civilized norm

In January of 2013, I was in Munich, Germany walking around downtown. I adore the art of pre-digital writing tools such as parchment paper and fountain pens, so naturally I became excited when I saw a store that sold fountain pens. I went in and had a terrific time looking at the hundreds of styles of fountain pens, ranging in price from 5 Euros to over 5,000 Euros.

But I did notice something that I have always noticed when looking at the ‘special’ editions of fountain pens that have been sold by the most ‘elite’ fountain pen companies: the special edition commemorates and perpetuates the narrative that the greatest artists, writers, philosophers and scientists are always white/lighter skinned people from the Occident (i.e. Europe).

W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Nella Larsen fall into my personal category of “greatest thinkers” that I would love to see represented in a line of commemorative fine fountain pens. I would love to have an Octavia Butler themed fountain pen. She was vegan. Angela Davis too who is also vegan.

Thus yet, I have never seen such commemoration of these ‘types’ of great thinkers while I have been living in the global West. While perusing fountain pens on on-line stores, I have failed to see anything like this as well. Of course there are many reasons for this, but the most obvious to me is that my “great thinker’s” ideas do not promote a ‘civilized norm’ for the producers and collective clientele of fine writing pens such as Mont Blanc. If anything, their ideas, political stance, activism, etc., greatly contest the normativity of Euro-centrism as the benchmark of “superior” art, math, science, and philosophy. And yes, I do know that companies like Mont Blanc are trying to appeal to a demographic of people that can afford $3000+ pens, and that this demographic is most likely white and of European descent…. But, I just wanted to share my thoughts of what was going on through my head while looking at the ‘special edition’ of fountain pens.