The Manics may have started out wanting to combine Guns N’ Roses with Public Enemy, but The Holy Bible was their whitest album yet. Paul Gilroy’s book “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987), which takes its title from a skinhead chant, and which “Ifwhiteamerica” references, explains how anti-racist movements themselves often end up unwittingly reifying more subtle forms of racism. The Holy Bible produces and is haunted by a whiteness of horror, a horror of whiteness; it reifies and fetishizes a monstrous, terminally self-critical whiteness. Visually, the album and its booklet set white on white: the whiteness of the artwork, especially the band of white on the album cover between the title and band name, and Strategy’s white flesh and white underwear, and the booklet’s centre pages also dominated by a white band above the band member photos. The whiteness of the snow in “4st 7lb” unstained by human footprint, its purity unsoiled, and “Mausoleum”’s “lamb-like winter, winter,” link the anorexic girl’s body with the Holocaust body. Like many white musicians and writers, Richey idolized and othered black anger as more authentic. “Black people have got a far more genuine rage than a white man could ever have. White people feel repressed, but black people are completely oppressed – so you get a real militancy” (qtd in Heatley 57), he remarks, whilst also addressing the specificity of white malaise as being one not of material circumstances, but of spiritual and ideological poverty, another iteration of Blur’s Modern Life Is Rubbish: “There’s an awful lot of white British kids who have never really gone hungry, always had a roof to live under but at the same time are desperately unhappy. It’s not total poverty, just a poverty of ideas” (qtd in Heatley 75). The Holy Bible’s critique of whiteness extends to and constructs a terminal whiteness of death, a memento mori for embattled whiteness, whose claim on hegemony is long out of date.