The sexual dramas of white men have to do with not being able to resist the drives or struggling to master them. The drives are typically characterized as dark.…But there need not be explicit or even implied racial reference, it is enough that there is darkness. This furnishes the heterosexual desire that will rescue whites from sterility while separating such desire from the what whites aspire to. Dark desires are part of the story of whiteness, but as what the whiteness of whiteness has to struggle against. Thus it is that the whiteness of white men resides in the tragic quality of their giving way to darkness and the heroism of their channeling or resisting it.

–Richard Dyer, White