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The History of White People
A mind-expanding and myth-destroying exploration of “whiteness”—an illuminating work on the history of race and power.
Eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter tells perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history. Beginning at the roots of Western civilization, she traces the invention of the idea of a white race—often for economic, scientific, and political ends. She shows how the origins of American identity in the eighteenth century were intrinsically tied to the elevation of white skin into the embodiment of beauty, power, and intelligence; how the great American intellectuals— including Ralph Waldo Emerson—insisted that only Anglo Saxons were truly American; and how the definitions of who is “white” and who is “American” have evolved over time.
A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes an enormous gap in a literature that has long focused on the nonwhite, and it forcefully reminds us that the concept of “race” is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed according to a long and rich history. 70 illustrations.
Eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter tells perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history. Beginning at the roots of Western civilization, she traces the invention of the idea of a white race—often for economic, scientific, and political ends. She shows how the origins of American identity in the eighteenth century were intrinsically tied to the elevation of white skin into the embodiment of beauty, power, and intelligence; how the great American intellectuals— including Ralph Waldo Emerson—insisted that only Anglo Saxons were truly American; and how the definitions of who is “white” and who is “American” have evolved over time.
A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes an enormous gap in a literature that has long focused on the nonwhite, and it forcefully reminds us that the concept of “race” is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed according to a long and rich history. 70 illustrations.
512 pages, Hardcover
First published March 15, 2010
About the author
Nell Irvin Painter
35 books350 followersNell Irvin Painter is an American historian notable for her works on southern history of the nineteenth century. She is retired from Princeton University, and served as president of the Organization of American Historians. She also served as president of the Southern Historical Association.
She was born Nell Irvin to Dona and Frank E. Irvin, Sr. She had an older brother Frank who died young. Her family moved from Houston, Texas, to Oakland, California when she was ten weeks old. This was part of the second wave of the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the Deep South to urban centers. Some of their relatives had been in California since the 1920s. The Irvins went to California in the 1940s with the pull of increasing jobs in the defense industry. Nell attended the Oakland Public Schools.
Her mother Dona Irvin held a degree from Houston College for Negroes (1937), and later taught in the public schools of Oakland. Her father had to drop out of college in 1937 during the Great Depression; he eventually trained for work as a laboratory technician. He worked for years at the University of California at Berkeley, where he trained many students in lab techniques.
Painter earned her B.A. - Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964. During her undergraduate years, she studied French medieval history at the University of Bordeaux, France, 1962–63. She also studied abroad at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, 1965–66. In 1967, she completed an M.A. at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1974, she earned an M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University. She returned to study and earned a B.F.A. at Rutgers University in 2009. Painter has received honorary degrees from Dartmouth College, Wesleyan University, and Yale University, among other institutions.
In 1989, Painter married the mathematician Glenn Shafer, co-creator of the Dempster–Shafer theory.
(from Wikipedia)
She was born Nell Irvin to Dona and Frank E. Irvin, Sr. She had an older brother Frank who died young. Her family moved from Houston, Texas, to Oakland, California when she was ten weeks old. This was part of the second wave of the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the Deep South to urban centers. Some of their relatives had been in California since the 1920s. The Irvins went to California in the 1940s with the pull of increasing jobs in the defense industry. Nell attended the Oakland Public Schools.
Her mother Dona Irvin held a degree from Houston College for Negroes (1937), and later taught in the public schools of Oakland. Her father had to drop out of college in 1937 during the Great Depression; he eventually trained for work as a laboratory technician. He worked for years at the University of California at Berkeley, where he trained many students in lab techniques.
Painter earned her B.A. - Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964. During her undergraduate years, she studied French medieval history at the University of Bordeaux, France, 1962–63. She also studied abroad at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, 1965–66. In 1967, she completed an M.A. at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1974, she earned an M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University. She returned to study and earned a B.F.A. at Rutgers University in 2009. Painter has received honorary degrees from Dartmouth College, Wesleyan University, and Yale University, among other institutions.
In 1989, Painter married the mathematician Glenn Shafer, co-creator of the Dempster–Shafer theory.
(from Wikipedia)
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November 27, 2016
Painter outlines an evolving story of whiteness (and construction of race) from ancient Greece to the present. The historical depth of this account was interesting, but it was most compelling when the focus shifted to the New World, especially 19th and 20th century America. Painter convincingly ties whiteness to what it means (or meant) to be a real American. She also shows how this identity converges with religion, patriotism and politics. Recommended read!
August 19, 2019
Painter traces the intellectual history of whiteness with attention to how the socially constructed category of “race” comes into formation. This is a critical project, not just a US History syllabus. She shows how people fabricated the idea of race as a means to justify subordination: specifically, how a set of cultural stereotypes became solidified as fixed and then how these entrenched ideas of groups created even more stereotypes which further bolstered the idea of inherent difference between “races.” A feedback loop.
I found the continual attention to notions of beauty most interesting: how Francis Galton who coined “eugenics” previously ranked women on the basis of their beauty, linking beauty to class difference. How a particular beauty aesthetic of white slavery eventually became abstracted to mark “human beauty as a scientifically certified racial trait,” and the lengths that white people took to preserve this idea of “beauty:” anti-immigrant policies, anti-interracial policies, forced sterilization of people with disabilities, etc. The triumph of whiteness was underplaying the role of culture/environment + overemphasizing ancestry + inheritance. This allowed white people to dismiss racialized people as inherently criminal without remaining accountable for the social institutions they set up specifically to create inequality (criminal acts).
Throughout history whiteness is always aspirational, something that had to be cultivated. And therein lies its insecure contradiction: whiteness represents itself as natural even though it is continually made. Historically the existence of white Others challenged its project of dominance like Irish people (“called white chimpanzees historically),” Jewish people, Italians, poor whites, disabled whites, queer whites. Various of these groups became assimilated into whiteness over time such that whiteness could maintain supremacy, especially over Black + Native people.
One is left thinking about the psycho-social dimensions of such a project: if whiteness is aspirational then individual white people don’t matter insomuch as they can be utilized. They aren’t made to matter for who they are, only for what they can become.
While I appreciated the focus on intellectual scholarship and attention to previously published books by white thinkers, I wish that a more vast and ambitious archive of knowledge production was considered. Even though the tone was largely accessible, it still -- at times -- felt difficult to trudge through. I wish some of the writing had been more emotive, and less dry historical. But that's just my own reading preference!
I found the continual attention to notions of beauty most interesting: how Francis Galton who coined “eugenics” previously ranked women on the basis of their beauty, linking beauty to class difference. How a particular beauty aesthetic of white slavery eventually became abstracted to mark “human beauty as a scientifically certified racial trait,” and the lengths that white people took to preserve this idea of “beauty:” anti-immigrant policies, anti-interracial policies, forced sterilization of people with disabilities, etc. The triumph of whiteness was underplaying the role of culture/environment + overemphasizing ancestry + inheritance. This allowed white people to dismiss racialized people as inherently criminal without remaining accountable for the social institutions they set up specifically to create inequality (criminal acts).
Throughout history whiteness is always aspirational, something that had to be cultivated. And therein lies its insecure contradiction: whiteness represents itself as natural even though it is continually made. Historically the existence of white Others challenged its project of dominance like Irish people (“called white chimpanzees historically),” Jewish people, Italians, poor whites, disabled whites, queer whites. Various of these groups became assimilated into whiteness over time such that whiteness could maintain supremacy, especially over Black + Native people.
One is left thinking about the psycho-social dimensions of such a project: if whiteness is aspirational then individual white people don’t matter insomuch as they can be utilized. They aren’t made to matter for who they are, only for what they can become.
While I appreciated the focus on intellectual scholarship and attention to previously published books by white thinkers, I wish that a more vast and ambitious archive of knowledge production was considered. Even though the tone was largely accessible, it still -- at times -- felt difficult to trudge through. I wish some of the writing had been more emotive, and less dry historical. But that's just my own reading preference!
June 26, 2017
Like many other racists, Gobineau had seemingly mastered the multilingual contents of entire libraries to formulate a universal truth that energetic races, certainly the Aryan, create national greatness.4.5/5
Preaching empire and racial cleansing in the name of science in National Life from the Standpoint of Science (1905), [Karl] Pearson said, "[M]y view—and I think it may be called the scientific view of a nation—is that of an organized whole, kept up to a high pitch of internal efficiency by insuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks, and kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races.
A great deal of my world makes sense after having read this book. I'm not saying it's perfect, analysis-wise or paradigm-wise or even grammar-wise. Whoever stuck their review on the spine of my edition certainly didn't actually read it, considering that they labeled the creation of white supremacy as "crazy" when, no, actually, sane people have been successfully wiping my kind out by sterilization and other forms of enforced violence for decades in order to, yes. Create white people. The author talks about Catholics versus Protestants in the 19th-20th centuries being the first iteration of religious wars on US soil, which does immense disservice against the hundreds of indigenous nations swallowed and spit out by various educational and military centers because of their systems of belief, highly racialized and exterminated by European religious hegemonies. However, fields of thought ranging from ancient Egypt to Kant and even further to the modern day military industrial complex fucking its way through the Middle East and the current Hispanic consensus are starting to fall together in extremely messed up yet morbidly fascinating ways. The ongoing plagues of whiny white baby boomers, obsessions with testing-based education, anti-blackness in non-white communities, and the popularity of Me Before You? All of it has a point, and sweetie, screaming "WE'RE ALL ONE RACE!&$*$" isn't going to do shit.
Any nation founded by slaveholders finds justification for its class system[.]I've known for some time now race had a weird scientific background to it. I'd say pseudoscience, but plenty of white men got PhD's and tenure and fame ranging from a comfortable speaking position to Ralph Waldo Emerson/Thomas Jefferson levels on this stuff, and nowadays Middle Eastern people are sorta kind not really but only when they're busy being Muslim are being turned white? Maybe? In short, so long as this stuff's handed around enough on the sociopolitical and/or cultural level to get hundreds of people killed and result in children being diagnosed with PTSD at around 90% of the population of various countries, this is what European science has wrought. It's come under many a name and incorporated over the centuries many a former lower tier in the form of Irish and Slavic and Mexican (belying the current 21st century obsession like nothing else). It's a theory, just like the theory of evolution and the theory of eugenics and the theory of capitalism, but if the most powerful demographics are well content with sitting put and not contesting them with all the privilege currently befitting their position, these theories are going to keep contextualizing "survival of the fittest" accordingly. Either you're okay with these intersecting systems of extermination, or you're not.
During the 1930s, following Buck v. Bell, local law enforcement and welfare officials rounded up the poor and sterilized them practically en masse: by 1968, some 65,000 Americans had been sterilized against their will, with California far in the lead and Virginia a distant second.
After the war Americans embraced intelligence testing more enthusiastically than people in other countries, but mental testing took place largely in the private sector. [Robert] Yerkes complained in 1941 of the U.S. military's neglect: "Germany has a long lead in the development of military psychology...The Nazis have achieved something that is entirely without parallel in military history...What has happened in German is the logical sequel to the psychological and personnel services in our own Army during 1917-1918."As far as pop paradigms of history go, this was a lot more fun and a lot less powerful than Medical Apartheid. It does have a broader field of usage, thanks to Painter's insistence on looking on not only who was being called "white", but how "whiteness" is created and maintained to this day through ingrained EuroAmerican cultural norms of degeneracy, which can involve anything from mixed blood to poverty to low IQs to cr*pples to crazies (I can use this because I am crazy. Neurotypicals, take a seat) to false and genocidal hierarchies such as intelligence, genius, and better off dead/sterile than alive. The usage, however, only comes if you apply it consistently, never shying away from confronting the comforts of utilizing modern day constructs that place many a "smart" person above a "stupid" one, an able anarchist above a technologically reliant disabled person, a sane sadist above an insane specialist in ethics. Reading this book will also point out the ubiquity of anti-blackness in waves of not yet white social climbers, as well as the antisemitic structuring of Jewishness as inherently white, although I would advise looking elsewhere for more nuanced critiques of the latter among others. Painter does a lot of good critical analysis here, but she's not Jewish, she's not indigenous in the US, she's not overtly disabled mentally or physically, and it shows.
In 1921 Franz Boas had published an article in the Yale Review questioning the racial interpretation of Army IQ tests, and in 1922 Walter Lipmann in the New Republic had denounced mental testers' claim to measure permanent, intrinsic intelligence. That kind of mental testing, he wrote, "has no more scientific foundation than a hundred other fads, vitamins and glands and amateur psychoanalysis and correspondence courses in will power, and it will pass with them into that limbo where phrenology and palmistry and characterology and the other Babu sciences are to be found."
In the twilight of their years, members of the GI Bill-FHA generation looked back on their economic success with a good deal of self-congratulation...Hard work, yes, but pushed along nicely by government assistance rarely acknowledged in the aftermath.I would be able to question more of the fine tuning of science in here if it were possible to study both BioEngineering and English in a health-focused and social justice-oriented education system in my country, but alas. In its place, I have the awareness that if you want to embrace ye olde Euro types with their philosophy and their multifarious fields and various other pontifications, whether French or German or English in all its former Dolphonic/Nordic/Mediterranean/Lower Saxon glory, much as translation is suspect, so is any study that looks at a thinker without acknowledging how their ethnically supremacist tendencies stabilize modern day genocides. I also know that I would've gotten more questions and outright entitled rudeness in reaction to reading this in public if I wasn't the whitest whitey white with the blue eyes and the blonde hair and pale as fuck skin that ever walked the earth. What I can say for certain is that this is a great book, as much for its broad range and ambitious undertakings as for its accessibility, so long as its readers continue to think, and to listen. I had a major depressive episode halfway through reading this, and am still not in the clear yet, so all you able people out there: do me a favor, and devote the energy I could not to getting through this as well as I would have like to have done.
With real American identity coded according to race, being a real American often meant joining antiblack racism and seeing oneself as white against the blacks...Malcolm X, spokesman of the black nationalist Nation of Islam, and Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize laureate in literature, later noted that the first English word out of the mouths of European immigrants was frequently "n——."For all my qualms and unfortunate circumstances, reading this through made me very happy to think about how I'm setting out, BA in English finally in hand, to work, whether on the biweekly paycheck or the test-taking way to grad school or a mix of both, depending on how my days go by. I don't live in a country that inherently values my existence, but thanks to the structures studied in this book, I will always have the easy way out of shitting on people who are black or less able to undertake a 40 hour work week or ace tests, and that, fellow readers, will always and forever be unacceptable. Putting this glibly, this book made me happy to be alive in an age that's not only poking holes in dominant and murderous ideologies, but pointing out the history of people poking holes in dominant and murderous ideologies, for this book has some very powerful moments while pointing out those people who refused to let "the times" define how much they valued other human beings. It's no Tumblr, and anyone who insults bigotry by calling them delusional or stupid is never someone I will ever trust, but this is one of the better works trees are cut down for.
The white ethnicity of the late twentieth century was little more than a leisure activity, one that American entrepreneurs embraced.
Ironically, perhaps, the woman whose skull gave white people [the name of Caucasian] had been a sex slave in Moscow, like thousands of her compatriots in Russia and the Ottoman empire.
September 1, 2017
This is a difficult book for me to accurately assess, since I am trying to be objective regarding the book's content while also expressing my disappointed expectations.
Objectively speaking, this book is a powerful scholarly work, a history of whiteness as determined by White Europeans. Painter delves into obscure European anthropological and sociological tomes on racial classification. This is part of why my interest started to wander; Painter spends way too much time on these European scholars and their works. In excruciating detail, she chronicles the lives of these European racists (I use this term more as a shorthand than anything), their relationships with each other, the circles they ran in, and the impact of their work. It results in a very rich historical tome, but not exactly what I was looking for.
To give you an example of what I mean by this laborious detail, Painter spends three chapters on Ralph Waldo Emerson. These chapters certainly touch on the development of racial theory at this time, but the bulk of them is devoted to Emerson's life, his impact, and the memory of him in American society. To me it read like a rather lengthy tangent that could have been adequately summed up in a single chapter.
One of the major strengths of this book is how well it elucidates just how much of racial "science" was actually pseudoscience - complete bullshit, in other words. Painter pulls direct quotes from these racial "scientists" that indicate that they had no understanding whatsoever of the scientific method, and their science was utterly flawed and nonsensical. Essentially, Painter is building up to an important face: race is not biological, and it never was. Race is, and always has been, a social construct. That is the crux of this book, the point it is trying to make by painstakingly detailing the work of European racial thinkers.
I was disappointed that European racial thinkers take up the majority of this book. I had been hoping to see, as a contrast, scholars from outside of Europe and how they thought of race and "whiteness." And yet, this is hardly touched upon. There were other significant issues I thought should have been discussed in greater detail. For example, there is no mention at all of the pivotal trial of Bhagat Singh Thind, where an Indian man was declared racially ineligible for US citizenship. There is no mention at all of similar trials that followed, of Syrians and other Middle Easterners, whose classification at the time depended sometimes on their skin color, sometimes on their religion, and sometimes on the political classification of their origins. In other words, it was a complete mess that illustrates the fallacy of racial classification quite well.
Middle Easterners and North Africans are hardly mentioned, which I think is a serious detriment to the argument of the book. As a group, MENA are legally classified as Caucasians, but there is so much confusion regarding this classification that it is essentially worthless. MENA folks occupy a vague racial category that can sparks fierce conversations on the meaning of race and ethnicity, and yet that is never mentioned in this book. Painter spends more time talking about racial divisions among white people (or those that are today considered white, such as Slavs, Irish, Italians) than the racial categories we know today.
Again, I want to say that I am trying to balance what this book actually is versus my personal expectations. Objectively, it is an excellent, impressive work of scholarship that details centuries of European racial thinking. I just found it disappointing in its hyper focus on European thinkers and the details of their lives. I ended up skimming many of these parts, as I had no interest whatsoever where this particular European racist went to school or what he accomplished in his life.
In sum, this is an important, significant work of scholarship that needs to exist, certainly, but I probably should have adjusted my expectations of it sooner.
Objectively speaking, this book is a powerful scholarly work, a history of whiteness as determined by White Europeans. Painter delves into obscure European anthropological and sociological tomes on racial classification. This is part of why my interest started to wander; Painter spends way too much time on these European scholars and their works. In excruciating detail, she chronicles the lives of these European racists (I use this term more as a shorthand than anything), their relationships with each other, the circles they ran in, and the impact of their work. It results in a very rich historical tome, but not exactly what I was looking for.
To give you an example of what I mean by this laborious detail, Painter spends three chapters on Ralph Waldo Emerson. These chapters certainly touch on the development of racial theory at this time, but the bulk of them is devoted to Emerson's life, his impact, and the memory of him in American society. To me it read like a rather lengthy tangent that could have been adequately summed up in a single chapter.
One of the major strengths of this book is how well it elucidates just how much of racial "science" was actually pseudoscience - complete bullshit, in other words. Painter pulls direct quotes from these racial "scientists" that indicate that they had no understanding whatsoever of the scientific method, and their science was utterly flawed and nonsensical. Essentially, Painter is building up to an important face: race is not biological, and it never was. Race is, and always has been, a social construct. That is the crux of this book, the point it is trying to make by painstakingly detailing the work of European racial thinkers.
I was disappointed that European racial thinkers take up the majority of this book. I had been hoping to see, as a contrast, scholars from outside of Europe and how they thought of race and "whiteness." And yet, this is hardly touched upon. There were other significant issues I thought should have been discussed in greater detail. For example, there is no mention at all of the pivotal trial of Bhagat Singh Thind, where an Indian man was declared racially ineligible for US citizenship. There is no mention at all of similar trials that followed, of Syrians and other Middle Easterners, whose classification at the time depended sometimes on their skin color, sometimes on their religion, and sometimes on the political classification of their origins. In other words, it was a complete mess that illustrates the fallacy of racial classification quite well.
Middle Easterners and North Africans are hardly mentioned, which I think is a serious detriment to the argument of the book. As a group, MENA are legally classified as Caucasians, but there is so much confusion regarding this classification that it is essentially worthless. MENA folks occupy a vague racial category that can sparks fierce conversations on the meaning of race and ethnicity, and yet that is never mentioned in this book. Painter spends more time talking about racial divisions among white people (or those that are today considered white, such as Slavs, Irish, Italians) than the racial categories we know today.
Again, I want to say that I am trying to balance what this book actually is versus my personal expectations. Objectively, it is an excellent, impressive work of scholarship that details centuries of European racial thinking. I just found it disappointing in its hyper focus on European thinkers and the details of their lives. I ended up skimming many of these parts, as I had no interest whatsoever where this particular European racist went to school or what he accomplished in his life.
In sum, this is an important, significant work of scholarship that needs to exist, certainly, but I probably should have adjusted my expectations of it sooner.
August 18, 2019
Imagine a White author writing 'The History of Black People', and you have the inverse of this book, if he were an ill-informed racist with a complete inability to use and weigh the literature and scholarly sources, unless those sources be of 'critical theory'. Not even just American blacks, but all blacks all over the world! The very attempt would be considered racist, and would in truth be terrible ethnography: that hypothetical author would examine American blacks (under the delusion that race is purely a social construct) and then use his 'findings' to condemn East Africans, West Africans, !Kung, Xhosa, Kalahari bushmen, and Aborigines. The author takes the concept of 'White' developed to describe European-Americans and then retrojectively forces it upon European Europeans and Western civilization itself.
The author advocates a one-sided theory of race which is pretty much the Augustinian theory of evil in the key of sociology and anthropology: Whiteness [evil] is the privation of coloredness [good]; White people don't exist; White people are evil.
More social constructionist nonsense - race doesn't exist but somehow Whites are the embodiment of evil and exploitation and the Holy Minority are the embodiment of all that is good and true.
An irremediably racist diatribe against White folk brimming with hatred for Western civilization and its accomplishments, no different than the genocidal Tommy Currys or Noel Ignatievs of the world.
For a corrective, read Duchesne on 'The Uniqueness of Western Civilization'; Frank Salter, 'On Genetic Interests'; and Nobel Prize-winning biologist Sarich and Miele's 'Race'.
The author advocates a one-sided theory of race which is pretty much the Augustinian theory of evil in the key of sociology and anthropology: Whiteness [evil] is the privation of coloredness [good]; White people don't exist; White people are evil.
More social constructionist nonsense - race doesn't exist but somehow Whites are the embodiment of evil and exploitation and the Holy Minority are the embodiment of all that is good and true.
An irremediably racist diatribe against White folk brimming with hatred for Western civilization and its accomplishments, no different than the genocidal Tommy Currys or Noel Ignatievs of the world.
For a corrective, read Duchesne on 'The Uniqueness of Western Civilization'; Frank Salter, 'On Genetic Interests'; and Nobel Prize-winning biologist Sarich and Miele's 'Race'.
August 20, 2021
This is a small thing, but I feel like it’s rare these days for a non-fiction book to lack a subtitle. The History of White People is minimalist in this sense: the title says it all. So too does the cover of my edition: pure white with a black circle in the centre containing the title and author in white block letters; nothing else on the front cover, blurbs pushed to the back and even to the spine. Between these covers, however, is a book that is far from minimalist. Historian Nell Irvin Painter has clearly Done the Research necessary to present a truly detailed, monumental look at the history of whiteness as a concept, an identity, a label. If you have questions about white people, this book probably has answers.
I can’t really summarize this book because it is so information dense. It’s more textbook than summer-read-on-the-deck, more reference read than cover-to-cover read. I learned a lot from it, but I’ll probably forget a lot too—and that’s fine. Just know going in that while this isn’t what I would term inaccessible, it is definitely quite academic.
Basically, Painter begins in ancient Greece and Rome and expands outwards from there as she takes along the timeline to the modern era. Along the way, she examines who counted as “white.” She explains the origins of the term Caucasian and its synonym with whiteness. She affirms that whiteness is a racial identity, yes, but also an economic one. That is to say that the scope of whiteness conveniently enlarges or contracts in order to further the economic gains of those in power. As Rome enlarged, so too did the definition of whiteness. Later, as Painter moves forward through the medieval period into the Renaissance and Enlightenment, we see how various thinkers in England and the Continent diverged in how they understood races and whiteness. Painter then moves focus to America, and the bulk of the final third of the book focuses on how American thinkers (including, notably, Ralph Waldo Emerson whom I wasn’t aware was so regarded a race scholar) enlarged whiteness.
This is a book that is exactly what it claims to be: it’s about race, but it’s about white people. I think we are—at least, I am—used to discussing race by focusing on non-white people. By placing the focus squarely on white people defining whiteness, Painter reminds us that our discussions of race invariably centre whiteness by assuming it is normative and non-white people are “racialized.” For this reason, Painter obviously discusses things like the American enslavement of Black people, yet she devotes less time to that than one might expect in a book about race. As she notes in her introduction, this is because there are literally libraries’ worth of books about African American history, inevitably a history that deals intimately with enslavement. In The History of White People, Painter is more interested in understanding how whiteness operates.
Painter is very careful here, and I am trying to be similarly careful in the language I use. Neither of us mean to suggest there is such a thing as a “white race” any more than the idea that all Black people belong to a “Black race” (or whatever label you want to use). Part of Painter’s overall thesis is that whiteness is a mutable, permeable label rather than a hard-and-fast biological, genetic, or even social construct. In this way, Painter seeks to undermine any hope of white supremacists to claim that there is a historical or scientific basis for whiteness-as-race, whiteness-as-national-identity, etc.
Sometimes the ways in which Painter addresses this ideas are surprising. Early in the book, Painter stresses that across the past two millennia of European history, the majority of enslaved people have been what we nowadays would consider white people. This is not meant to diminish the atrocities of later colonial enslavement. Rather, Painter seeks to establish the economic origin of slavery—that is to say, enslavement came first as a means of profit-making, and the racialized connotations of enslavement in the 17th century emerged later as justification for the institutionalization of enslavement in a society that otherwise prides itself on liberty. Racism and ideas of racial superiority, then, are ultimately a form of cognitive dissonance, a house of cards from which oppressive systems can be built.
Similarly, when Painter arrives to the American era, she focuses a lot on the oppression of the Irish. This is a common talking about that white people use when they want to diminish the history of Black enslavement in the States; people love to claim Irish ancestry and talk about how their ancestors were slaves too. Yes and no, Painter says, because of course it’s far more nuanced. By actually referring to primary sources (shocking, I know), Painter helps us ground this oppression in the context of British colonialism and the fluctuating American attitudes towards immigration. I know those white people who would say, “But what about the Irish?” aren’t the people who would read this book, but they should be.
I’ll stop short of recommending this book to everyone, because honestly it is a slog. It took me so long mostly because I was busy with work while reading it, but it is also a very dense book. I consider this only a plus, however, because this book is loaded with great research and sources. My overall takeaway actually emerged early in my reading: Painter reminds me of how complex, how dense our history really is. No matter how much you study, no matter how much you think you know about these concepts, there is always more to learn, deeper to go. When I first started The History of White People, I thought I had a good comprehension of how modern concepts of race emerged. Indeed, Painter affirms a lot of what I thought I understood—but she goes so much deeper, making connections I never would have heard of otherwise, such as between Emerson and transcendentalism.
So this book reminds me to be humble. I love learning and love passing on my knowledge to others. But I also want to acknowledge that there is always more learning for me to do. I wish more people, especially people on the Internet, would recognize this instead of holding forth on everything as if they are the last word on that subject. I don’t debate with people on these types of topics on Twitter, for instance, because there is no way to squeeze this nuance into tweets. Instead, I’m going to spend my time reading more intense, interesting, edifying books like this.
Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter.
I can’t really summarize this book because it is so information dense. It’s more textbook than summer-read-on-the-deck, more reference read than cover-to-cover read. I learned a lot from it, but I’ll probably forget a lot too—and that’s fine. Just know going in that while this isn’t what I would term inaccessible, it is definitely quite academic.
Basically, Painter begins in ancient Greece and Rome and expands outwards from there as she takes along the timeline to the modern era. Along the way, she examines who counted as “white.” She explains the origins of the term Caucasian and its synonym with whiteness. She affirms that whiteness is a racial identity, yes, but also an economic one. That is to say that the scope of whiteness conveniently enlarges or contracts in order to further the economic gains of those in power. As Rome enlarged, so too did the definition of whiteness. Later, as Painter moves forward through the medieval period into the Renaissance and Enlightenment, we see how various thinkers in England and the Continent diverged in how they understood races and whiteness. Painter then moves focus to America, and the bulk of the final third of the book focuses on how American thinkers (including, notably, Ralph Waldo Emerson whom I wasn’t aware was so regarded a race scholar) enlarged whiteness.
This is a book that is exactly what it claims to be: it’s about race, but it’s about white people. I think we are—at least, I am—used to discussing race by focusing on non-white people. By placing the focus squarely on white people defining whiteness, Painter reminds us that our discussions of race invariably centre whiteness by assuming it is normative and non-white people are “racialized.” For this reason, Painter obviously discusses things like the American enslavement of Black people, yet she devotes less time to that than one might expect in a book about race. As she notes in her introduction, this is because there are literally libraries’ worth of books about African American history, inevitably a history that deals intimately with enslavement. In The History of White People, Painter is more interested in understanding how whiteness operates.
Painter is very careful here, and I am trying to be similarly careful in the language I use. Neither of us mean to suggest there is such a thing as a “white race” any more than the idea that all Black people belong to a “Black race” (or whatever label you want to use). Part of Painter’s overall thesis is that whiteness is a mutable, permeable label rather than a hard-and-fast biological, genetic, or even social construct. In this way, Painter seeks to undermine any hope of white supremacists to claim that there is a historical or scientific basis for whiteness-as-race, whiteness-as-national-identity, etc.
Sometimes the ways in which Painter addresses this ideas are surprising. Early in the book, Painter stresses that across the past two millennia of European history, the majority of enslaved people have been what we nowadays would consider white people. This is not meant to diminish the atrocities of later colonial enslavement. Rather, Painter seeks to establish the economic origin of slavery—that is to say, enslavement came first as a means of profit-making, and the racialized connotations of enslavement in the 17th century emerged later as justification for the institutionalization of enslavement in a society that otherwise prides itself on liberty. Racism and ideas of racial superiority, then, are ultimately a form of cognitive dissonance, a house of cards from which oppressive systems can be built.
Similarly, when Painter arrives to the American era, she focuses a lot on the oppression of the Irish. This is a common talking about that white people use when they want to diminish the history of Black enslavement in the States; people love to claim Irish ancestry and talk about how their ancestors were slaves too. Yes and no, Painter says, because of course it’s far more nuanced. By actually referring to primary sources (shocking, I know), Painter helps us ground this oppression in the context of British colonialism and the fluctuating American attitudes towards immigration. I know those white people who would say, “But what about the Irish?” aren’t the people who would read this book, but they should be.
I’ll stop short of recommending this book to everyone, because honestly it is a slog. It took me so long mostly because I was busy with work while reading it, but it is also a very dense book. I consider this only a plus, however, because this book is loaded with great research and sources. My overall takeaway actually emerged early in my reading: Painter reminds me of how complex, how dense our history really is. No matter how much you study, no matter how much you think you know about these concepts, there is always more to learn, deeper to go. When I first started The History of White People, I thought I had a good comprehension of how modern concepts of race emerged. Indeed, Painter affirms a lot of what I thought I understood—but she goes so much deeper, making connections I never would have heard of otherwise, such as between Emerson and transcendentalism.
So this book reminds me to be humble. I love learning and love passing on my knowledge to others. But I also want to acknowledge that there is always more learning for me to do. I wish more people, especially people on the Internet, would recognize this instead of holding forth on everything as if they are the last word on that subject. I don’t debate with people on these types of topics on Twitter, for instance, because there is no way to squeeze this nuance into tweets. Instead, I’m going to spend my time reading more intense, interesting, edifying books like this.
Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter.
January 2, 2011
Race is a social, not a scientific, construct. This book is the most thorough exploration of how it came about beginning with classic Greek and Roman thoughts on the subject and proceeding through history to the modern day. Particularly fascinating are the various ways in which the desirable race--not just white but initially Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, or Nordic--has been enlarged in various stages to include some so that others might be more forcibly excluded.
This is not an easy book to read, and it was full of disappointments for me personally. Not only did my own ancestors--Irish Americans, German Americans, and Italian Americans--throw others under the bus to be classified as "White" and make their own way out of poverty, but some of my favorite historical figures were prominent racial theorists. I find Teddy Roosevelt's strong stance in favor of eugenics profoundly disturbing, not only because I find the concept of breeding humans like poodles horrifying but because he has always been one of my favorite quirky characters in history. Not to mention that Charles Lindbergh--the great aviator after whom my roommate and I recently named a kitten--wrote articles just before WWII suggesting that Europeans turn from their quarrels and "build our White ramparts again." You know, to defend against the "pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown."
Race is one of the most important discussions in our culture today, understanding how patently false the assumptions were that lead to the creation of the idea can help us to come to terms with the other injustices of our history. After all, as Painter concludes, "poverty in a dark skin endures as the opposite of whiteness, driven by an age-old social yearning to characterize the poor as permanently other and inherently inferior." I highly recommend this book to every reader.
This is not an easy book to read, and it was full of disappointments for me personally. Not only did my own ancestors--Irish Americans, German Americans, and Italian Americans--throw others under the bus to be classified as "White" and make their own way out of poverty, but some of my favorite historical figures were prominent racial theorists. I find Teddy Roosevelt's strong stance in favor of eugenics profoundly disturbing, not only because I find the concept of breeding humans like poodles horrifying but because he has always been one of my favorite quirky characters in history. Not to mention that Charles Lindbergh--the great aviator after whom my roommate and I recently named a kitten--wrote articles just before WWII suggesting that Europeans turn from their quarrels and "build our White ramparts again." You know, to defend against the "pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown."
Race is one of the most important discussions in our culture today, understanding how patently false the assumptions were that lead to the creation of the idea can help us to come to terms with the other injustices of our history. After all, as Painter concludes, "poverty in a dark skin endures as the opposite of whiteness, driven by an age-old social yearning to characterize the poor as permanently other and inherently inferior." I highly recommend this book to every reader.
September 20, 2022
Read through page 227 of 396.
I went into this book knowing that a more accurate title would be along the lines of “Constructions of Whiteness in American History (and the history of places traditionally seen as the U.S.’s cultural predecessors),” but the selection of what to include is bizarre, the analysis questionable and there wasn’t enough information new to me to keep me wanting to push through.
There’s a section on Greeks and Romans that seems to want to make the point that they didn’t conceptualize people as belonging to races, but rather cultures. This chapter spends a lot of time quoting their descriptions of various “barbarian” cultures. This confused me, because what is it trying to prove? Generalizing about culture is in no way inconsistent with also conceptualizing race. I was interested in the discussion of how we know Greeks and Romans didn’t conceptualize race, but that isn’t here (and I hope it rests on firmer foundations than what Painter presents).
Painter then jumps ahead to early modern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, and skips the trans-Atlantic slave trade entirely to focus on art history, because apparently centuries of large-scale exploitation of people based on race did not cause Europeans to create a “white” identity, but the fact that Roman statues happened to be done in white marble totally did? Painter doesn’t explicitly make any posits about where the concept of whiteness (as opposed to the typical human way of identifying oneself, which is as a member of a nation or tribe rather than some overarching racial identity) first came from, which seems like a major oversight in a book about the subject. But as far as I can tell from where she spends her time, her money is on rock formations.
Also, she devotes a full 39 pages (10% of the book!) to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Why? Well, he wrote some stuff glorifying the virile, handsome, murderous (a compliment, if you’re Emerson) Saxon race. So did a lot of other people at the same time who are barely mentioned, but he had a bigger platform. The notion of several “white races,” of which the Saxons were the best, was not new with Emerson. I just don’t see any rhyme or reason to which thinkers Painter covers in-depth and which barely or not at all.
You might get more out of this book than I did if you are unfamiliar with the concept of race as a social construction rather than biological fact, or if you aren’t very familiar with American history (if for instance the following do not ring a bell: indentured servitude; waves of European immigration prompting nativist backlashes, including virulent anti-Irish prejudice; the eugenics movement). But still, it’s a little dry and spends more time going into detail on various thinkers than on actual historical events.
Also, I already knew this, but in case you didn’t: the term “Caucasian”? Invented because ladies from the Caucasus Mountains—often sold as sex slaves—were apparently super hot. And obviously, white people should be named after the most attractive examples. Painter documents with photographic evidence that women from the Caucasus aren’t actually that hot, which is kind of funny but also a bit mean-spirited.
I would be interested in an alternative, perhaps less U.S.-focused book on the subject, but this one was quite a disappointment.
I went into this book knowing that a more accurate title would be along the lines of “Constructions of Whiteness in American History (and the history of places traditionally seen as the U.S.’s cultural predecessors),” but the selection of what to include is bizarre, the analysis questionable and there wasn’t enough information new to me to keep me wanting to push through.
There’s a section on Greeks and Romans that seems to want to make the point that they didn’t conceptualize people as belonging to races, but rather cultures. This chapter spends a lot of time quoting their descriptions of various “barbarian” cultures. This confused me, because what is it trying to prove? Generalizing about culture is in no way inconsistent with also conceptualizing race. I was interested in the discussion of how we know Greeks and Romans didn’t conceptualize race, but that isn’t here (and I hope it rests on firmer foundations than what Painter presents).
Painter then jumps ahead to early modern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, and skips the trans-Atlantic slave trade entirely to focus on art history, because apparently centuries of large-scale exploitation of people based on race did not cause Europeans to create a “white” identity, but the fact that Roman statues happened to be done in white marble totally did? Painter doesn’t explicitly make any posits about where the concept of whiteness (as opposed to the typical human way of identifying oneself, which is as a member of a nation or tribe rather than some overarching racial identity) first came from, which seems like a major oversight in a book about the subject. But as far as I can tell from where she spends her time, her money is on rock formations.
Also, she devotes a full 39 pages (10% of the book!) to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Why? Well, he wrote some stuff glorifying the virile, handsome, murderous (a compliment, if you’re Emerson) Saxon race. So did a lot of other people at the same time who are barely mentioned, but he had a bigger platform. The notion of several “white races,” of which the Saxons were the best, was not new with Emerson. I just don’t see any rhyme or reason to which thinkers Painter covers in-depth and which barely or not at all.
You might get more out of this book than I did if you are unfamiliar with the concept of race as a social construction rather than biological fact, or if you aren’t very familiar with American history (if for instance the following do not ring a bell: indentured servitude; waves of European immigration prompting nativist backlashes, including virulent anti-Irish prejudice; the eugenics movement). But still, it’s a little dry and spends more time going into detail on various thinkers than on actual historical events.
Also, I already knew this, but in case you didn’t: the term “Caucasian”? Invented because ladies from the Caucasus Mountains—often sold as sex slaves—were apparently super hot. And obviously, white people should be named after the most attractive examples. Painter documents with photographic evidence that women from the Caucasus aren’t actually that hot, which is kind of funny but also a bit mean-spirited.
I would be interested in an alternative, perhaps less U.S.-focused book on the subject, but this one was quite a disappointment.
February 24, 2011
As a policy debater, I've always enjoyed reading critical studies of race — and Painter's examination of "whiteness" is a great example of critical investigation into the assumptions that underlie the status quo. The History of White People provides a lot of interesting insight into what it means to be white and how being white has become accepted as an enshrined status quo good. It also leads us as as readers to wonder, "Is this how it will always be?"
Like any good book should, The History of White People leaves its reader with both questions and answers: answers as to the origins of the concept of "being white," and questions as to the future of "being white," especially in an increasingly multinational and decreasingly Eurocentric world world.
Like any good book should, The History of White People leaves its reader with both questions and answers: answers as to the origins of the concept of "being white," and questions as to the future of "being white," especially in an increasingly multinational and decreasingly Eurocentric world world.
September 22, 2010
This book really ought to be called "The Construction of Race in America," but a bold title like "The History of White People" is catchier - heck, I checked out the book.
Author Nell Irvin Painter starts with a very quick survey of pre-American concepts of race in Europe. Romans didn't classify people by skin color, but rather by tribe and region, we learn. As mainstream European views evolved for several centuries, they often fixated on groups of people, but rarely with a concept of "race" like we understand today.
Then its time to get to the meat of the book, which is an examination of how race has been understood in America since the colonial days, and how the concept of race has been bolstered by bad science and used as a tool for power by the elite whites of one era after another.
As a good little liberal arts college student, I read and heard and was told "race is a social construct" again and again and again, and I even believed it, kind of, though I realize now that I didn't fully understand this concept even as I endorsed it. "The History of White People," a slow, academic, but accessible read, painstakingly shows how the construct was built - and how flimsy its scaffolding remains.
Author Nell Irvin Painter starts with a very quick survey of pre-American concepts of race in Europe. Romans didn't classify people by skin color, but rather by tribe and region, we learn. As mainstream European views evolved for several centuries, they often fixated on groups of people, but rarely with a concept of "race" like we understand today.
Then its time to get to the meat of the book, which is an examination of how race has been understood in America since the colonial days, and how the concept of race has been bolstered by bad science and used as a tool for power by the elite whites of one era after another.
As a good little liberal arts college student, I read and heard and was told "race is a social construct" again and again and again, and I even believed it, kind of, though I realize now that I didn't fully understand this concept even as I endorsed it. "The History of White People," a slow, academic, but accessible read, painstakingly shows how the construct was built - and how flimsy its scaffolding remains.
April 28, 2017
From the book
Can the average man win political office without the backing of Superpacs?
Does poor=slaves and rich=masters
The many ways slavery can be identified today.
―minimum wage
―welfare
―religious fighting to force their values on others
―inability to get a fair trail
―The rich making rules for the non-rich
―Men’s attitudes concerning women
Author Nell Irvin Painter did an extraordinary job in researching The History of White People from Antiquity to the present. The History of White People showed the ugly side of the mentality of the white European male who thought nothing about selling wife, parents, siblings or children for money nor did they think anything about having sex with children, including their own. The European male also thought nothing of stealing his neighbors children and selling them into slavery.
What I liked about The History of White People was that it placed the reader into the mind of current day males (politicians and corporate suits) who are in power and who emulate the behaviors of their ancestors, if not, their idols.
The History of White People is a message that must be heard!
The History of White People should be required reading at the high school and college levels and for students studying sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, law, political science and the like.
The History of White People was well written and well edited.
Author Pointer’s research was beyond reproach. Author Painter started with a timeline from which she never deviated. Author Painter never inserted her opinion; just the facts.
After reading The History of White People readers will view the white male, and, perhaps the white female, in power from a different viewpoint.
The History of White People is an important read in that it demonstrates the importance of non-whites to elect their own candidates if they ever expect to be treated as equals and with dignity and respect and to be able to compete on a level playing field.
Can the average man win political office without the backing of Superpacs?
Does poor=slaves and rich=masters
The many ways slavery can be identified today.
―minimum wage
―welfare
―religious fighting to force their values on others
―inability to get a fair trail
―The rich making rules for the non-rich
―Men’s attitudes concerning women
Author Nell Irvin Painter did an extraordinary job in researching The History of White People from Antiquity to the present. The History of White People showed the ugly side of the mentality of the white European male who thought nothing about selling wife, parents, siblings or children for money nor did they think anything about having sex with children, including their own. The European male also thought nothing of stealing his neighbors children and selling them into slavery.
What I liked about The History of White People was that it placed the reader into the mind of current day males (politicians and corporate suits) who are in power and who emulate the behaviors of their ancestors, if not, their idols.
The History of White People is a message that must be heard!
The History of White People should be required reading at the high school and college levels and for students studying sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, law, political science and the like.
The History of White People was well written and well edited.
Author Pointer’s research was beyond reproach. Author Painter started with a timeline from which she never deviated. Author Painter never inserted her opinion; just the facts.
After reading The History of White People readers will view the white male, and, perhaps the white female, in power from a different viewpoint.
The History of White People is an important read in that it demonstrates the importance of non-whites to elect their own candidates if they ever expect to be treated as equals and with dignity and respect and to be able to compete on a level playing field.
July 15, 2012
Yikes -- I know, the title of this book sounds vaguely Nazi-ish, but it couldn't be further from that. Nell Painter is a professor at Princeton, and is a black woman. Her book covers the historical concept of "white" -- where it came from, who's been "in" and "out" of that category over the centuries, etc. Chances are, if you count as "white" in America in 2011, not all of your ancestors were -- over the course of the last couple of thousand years -- also "white" according to the thinking of their day. Always fascinating, sometimes depressing, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.
If you have ever been tempted to call yourself "Caucasian" because it sounded . . . kinda . . . scientific . . . or less skinhead-ish than "white" . . . or like a pithy alternative to "most of my ancestors came from the countries who currently make up NATO" . . . well, then, this book is the perfect way to enlighten yourself on why the term "Caucasian," like a lot of thinking about race (a term that no credible biologist today will tell you has any valid meaning), is fraught with historical problems and inaccuracies that still haunt us today. Seriously. Good stuff here.
Can I write more convoluted sentences (with more confusing parenthetical remarks) if I tried? Sorry. I'm off duty as an editor today.
If you have ever been tempted to call yourself "Caucasian" because it sounded . . . kinda . . . scientific . . . or less skinhead-ish than "white" . . . or like a pithy alternative to "most of my ancestors came from the countries who currently make up NATO" . . . well, then, this book is the perfect way to enlighten yourself on why the term "Caucasian," like a lot of thinking about race (a term that no credible biologist today will tell you has any valid meaning), is fraught with historical problems and inaccuracies that still haunt us today. Seriously. Good stuff here.
Can I write more convoluted sentences (with more confusing parenthetical remarks) if I tried? Sorry. I'm off duty as an editor today.
April 20, 2010
This was very disappointing, especially since it came from the highly respected scholar Nell Irvin Painter. Whether she intended the ambiguity in the title or not, I don't know. The history of white people could mean a history chronicling the activities of people who thought of themselves as white, or of those who have been thought of as white. It also could mean that it's a history of the concept of "white" as an anthropological or social category. Or, it could mean that it is a history of people who actually are white. That is, it could indicate an assumption that whiteness is not in doubt as a category, and there are white people and they have a history different from people who aren't white.
To some extent, all of these meanings of "white" make an appearance in the book, although Painter clearly shows that being white is not an inherent category, except for Nordic people. Different ethnic groups in America, such as the Jews and the Italians, have been thought of as not being white, especially in the early days of immigration from Europe. As they assimilated culturally, however, their status changed to being white. This is a very different matter than the racial category of African Americans and Orientals who are differentiated from whites no matter how assimilated they become to the dominant culture. The fact that Jews and Italians miraculously became "white" in a generation or two, but the others can't be "white" ever, indicates that the concept of being white racially is different from being white socially. At least it does to me.
Painter starts out by noting that the Romans had no word for race in Latin. They spoke of the Barbarians as belonging to tribes. The problem with her long disquisition of this phenomenon is that (1) she doesn't define what race means and (2) she doesn't define what tribe meant to the Romans.
In all languages, words are polysemous, which means that most words have several meanings. This poses a problem in translation because a word that one uses to translate one meaning in one's language, will also have other meanings that the languages don't share. As she describes how the Romans viewed tribes, it becomes apparent that they ascribed physical and mental characteristics as inherent in each tribe. No, they didn't call themselves white, nor did they call anybody else white (or so Painter says.) However, going by her descriptions, and my own understanding of the many things that the word race can mean, the Romans were using a word that we translate as tribe in the same way that English speakers use the word race. If whiteness wasn't a criterion for the Romans, that doesn't mean that they didn't believe in the category of an inherent, genetic set of physical and mental traits amongst different groups.
In other words, they believed in race as a discriminator between peoples. The Romans being Mediterranean were, in the main, darker skinned than the Norsemen and many Celts, so they certainly wouldn't have thought of skin lighter than theirs as a mark of superiority. She doesn't mention if the Romans were familiar with the much darker skin colorings of some Africans. Since the Romans did go to Egypt, I presume they must have at least seen Nubians, but Painter doesn't say what Romans thought of Nubians in terms of color. Maybe there is no record of that. In any event, the Romans did mention the complexions of various tribes, but color itself seems to have been only one possible factor in ranking people intellectually or otherwise. Often it didn't count at all.
It certainly had nothing to do with slaves. The Romans and many other peoples of the time had numerous slaves and those slaves were not African. In fact, Greek slaves in Rome actually were in charge of educating the Romans. Painter dwells on the fact that slaves throughout history were "white." This was true even in America with indentured servants from the British Isles who were often very blond.
Painter devotes much of the book to the slipperiness and vagueness of the notion of race. Certainly, it has meant very different things at different times in the history of English. In the 18th and 19th centuries, that term was used to indicate cultural differences, so that people spoke of the French race, the German race, the Russian race, the Norwegian race, and so on. In the 20th Century, speaking of the Jewish race was not only common, but tragic. Most Americans today, when speaking of race mean African Americans as contrasted with the white race. I just filled out the US census form. I don't recall it using the word race, but it did ask you to check off Caucasian, Hispanic, African American, Native American, or Oriental (I think those were the categories.) I know on college applications, they also had "Pacific Islanders." There is no definition of any of these terms on any form. I don't know if the government has any criteria which it uses to define those groups, nor if anthropologists have come up with any such definitions. Actually, so far as I know, they haven't come close.
In short, I agree with most of what Painter says. Little of it is original, at least to a social scientist. She is very sloppy in her terminology, which is partially a result of the sloppiness of the words white, when used to designate people, and the word race. As a scholar, however, she should have made very clear her own definitions of these terms. That she didn't causes a great many questions to be raised about her conclusions.
To some extent, all of these meanings of "white" make an appearance in the book, although Painter clearly shows that being white is not an inherent category, except for Nordic people. Different ethnic groups in America, such as the Jews and the Italians, have been thought of as not being white, especially in the early days of immigration from Europe. As they assimilated culturally, however, their status changed to being white. This is a very different matter than the racial category of African Americans and Orientals who are differentiated from whites no matter how assimilated they become to the dominant culture. The fact that Jews and Italians miraculously became "white" in a generation or two, but the others can't be "white" ever, indicates that the concept of being white racially is different from being white socially. At least it does to me.
Painter starts out by noting that the Romans had no word for race in Latin. They spoke of the Barbarians as belonging to tribes. The problem with her long disquisition of this phenomenon is that (1) she doesn't define what race means and (2) she doesn't define what tribe meant to the Romans.
In all languages, words are polysemous, which means that most words have several meanings. This poses a problem in translation because a word that one uses to translate one meaning in one's language, will also have other meanings that the languages don't share. As she describes how the Romans viewed tribes, it becomes apparent that they ascribed physical and mental characteristics as inherent in each tribe. No, they didn't call themselves white, nor did they call anybody else white (or so Painter says.) However, going by her descriptions, and my own understanding of the many things that the word race can mean, the Romans were using a word that we translate as tribe in the same way that English speakers use the word race. If whiteness wasn't a criterion for the Romans, that doesn't mean that they didn't believe in the category of an inherent, genetic set of physical and mental traits amongst different groups.
In other words, they believed in race as a discriminator between peoples. The Romans being Mediterranean were, in the main, darker skinned than the Norsemen and many Celts, so they certainly wouldn't have thought of skin lighter than theirs as a mark of superiority. She doesn't mention if the Romans were familiar with the much darker skin colorings of some Africans. Since the Romans did go to Egypt, I presume they must have at least seen Nubians, but Painter doesn't say what Romans thought of Nubians in terms of color. Maybe there is no record of that. In any event, the Romans did mention the complexions of various tribes, but color itself seems to have been only one possible factor in ranking people intellectually or otherwise. Often it didn't count at all.
It certainly had nothing to do with slaves. The Romans and many other peoples of the time had numerous slaves and those slaves were not African. In fact, Greek slaves in Rome actually were in charge of educating the Romans. Painter dwells on the fact that slaves throughout history were "white." This was true even in America with indentured servants from the British Isles who were often very blond.
Painter devotes much of the book to the slipperiness and vagueness of the notion of race. Certainly, it has meant very different things at different times in the history of English. In the 18th and 19th centuries, that term was used to indicate cultural differences, so that people spoke of the French race, the German race, the Russian race, the Norwegian race, and so on. In the 20th Century, speaking of the Jewish race was not only common, but tragic. Most Americans today, when speaking of race mean African Americans as contrasted with the white race. I just filled out the US census form. I don't recall it using the word race, but it did ask you to check off Caucasian, Hispanic, African American, Native American, or Oriental (I think those were the categories.) I know on college applications, they also had "Pacific Islanders." There is no definition of any of these terms on any form. I don't know if the government has any criteria which it uses to define those groups, nor if anthropologists have come up with any such definitions. Actually, so far as I know, they haven't come close.
In short, I agree with most of what Painter says. Little of it is original, at least to a social scientist. She is very sloppy in her terminology, which is partially a result of the sloppiness of the words white, when used to designate people, and the word race. As a scholar, however, she should have made very clear her own definitions of these terms. That she didn't causes a great many questions to be raised about her conclusions.
March 5, 2017
The primary takeaway from The History of White People is that whiteness, and the entire construct of race, is like a really recent thing.
Of course I had heard this before, but for some reason, the gravity of this fact never really registered for me before reading this book.
That force of nature we call race, with whiteness at the center of the shit storm, is like a 100% made up thing, and not even that long ago.
Dude!
This is not to say that difference isn't real, or that culture is trivial. No no. Not at all. It's real. It's really real.
But the demarcation of social status, as conferred by skin color, and shit like tweaky little noses and thin lips and shit (as opposed to class, or vocation, or religion, or region of origin) that's like a pretty recent thing. And it's almost entirely indigenous to America.
How did I not know this?
Somehow I just sort of assumed that whiteness always existed, and it was like this REAL thing, and like white people always identified as white, and always otherized black and brown people since the dawn of creation.
Nope.
In fact, now that I say it like that, it sounds so fucking dumb. Of course that isn't the case. That literally couldn't possibly be the case.
The truth of the matter is, that white people pretty much made the whole darn thing up, like 200 years ago (well like a little longer ago than that, but you get it), and guess what, they conveniently positioned themselves at the top of the totem pole.
If you're still not convinced, or if you're curious at all as to how this swindle went down, than go ahead and read this dang book already.
It chronicles the making of whiteness, beginning with ancient Greece (who's citizenship absolutely did not consider themselves white, because that shit didn't exist yet) and continuing through to European colonialism, and to the American slave trade, and the American revolution, and the genesis of democracy, and on to European romanticism, through to the beginning of scientific racism, to the American eugenics movement (where by 65,000 Americans were legally involuntarily sterilized) which later inspired the Nazzis.
And then the whole 2016 election thing happened......
Anyway, one of the many bitter revelations in the book concerns (one of my former heroes) Ralph Waldo Emerson (of all people), who as it turns out, in addition to being a grooving AF transcendentalist (and who is like the godfather of the whole hippy back to nature thing) also contributed handsomely to white race theory.
Son of a gun!
Another one of the awful clinkers in this story (for me anyway) was the prominent role the social sciences (most notably psychology, and more specifically psychometrics) played in the systematic validation of crackhead AF white racist theory.
Wow yuck!
Another fascinating twist in the story is the process by which formerly non-white groups (like the Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans and Jews) were progressively admitted into the American whiteness club (initially limited to Europeans of Nordic decent) as they assimilated into American life.
Doing!
Lest I fail to mention, the book is phenomenally well written and researched. It's a marvelous piece of scholarship.
My third eye has been violently forced open by this psychic crowbar of a text.
Fuck yeah!
Five stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Of course I had heard this before, but for some reason, the gravity of this fact never really registered for me before reading this book.
That force of nature we call race, with whiteness at the center of the shit storm, is like a 100% made up thing, and not even that long ago.
Dude!
This is not to say that difference isn't real, or that culture is trivial. No no. Not at all. It's real. It's really real.
But the demarcation of social status, as conferred by skin color, and shit like tweaky little noses and thin lips and shit (as opposed to class, or vocation, or religion, or region of origin) that's like a pretty recent thing. And it's almost entirely indigenous to America.
How did I not know this?
Somehow I just sort of assumed that whiteness always existed, and it was like this REAL thing, and like white people always identified as white, and always otherized black and brown people since the dawn of creation.
Nope.
In fact, now that I say it like that, it sounds so fucking dumb. Of course that isn't the case. That literally couldn't possibly be the case.
The truth of the matter is, that white people pretty much made the whole darn thing up, like 200 years ago (well like a little longer ago than that, but you get it), and guess what, they conveniently positioned themselves at the top of the totem pole.
If you're still not convinced, or if you're curious at all as to how this swindle went down, than go ahead and read this dang book already.
It chronicles the making of whiteness, beginning with ancient Greece (who's citizenship absolutely did not consider themselves white, because that shit didn't exist yet) and continuing through to European colonialism, and to the American slave trade, and the American revolution, and the genesis of democracy, and on to European romanticism, through to the beginning of scientific racism, to the American eugenics movement (where by 65,000 Americans were legally involuntarily sterilized) which later inspired the Nazzis.
And then the whole 2016 election thing happened......
Anyway, one of the many bitter revelations in the book concerns (one of my former heroes) Ralph Waldo Emerson (of all people), who as it turns out, in addition to being a grooving AF transcendentalist (and who is like the godfather of the whole hippy back to nature thing) also contributed handsomely to white race theory.
Son of a gun!
Another one of the awful clinkers in this story (for me anyway) was the prominent role the social sciences (most notably psychology, and more specifically psychometrics) played in the systematic validation of crackhead AF white racist theory.
Wow yuck!
Another fascinating twist in the story is the process by which formerly non-white groups (like the Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans and Jews) were progressively admitted into the American whiteness club (initially limited to Europeans of Nordic decent) as they assimilated into American life.
Doing!
Lest I fail to mention, the book is phenomenally well written and researched. It's a marvelous piece of scholarship.
My third eye has been violently forced open by this psychic crowbar of a text.
Fuck yeah!
Five stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
February 21, 2019
This book will cut the nonsense and open your eyes.
It’s not about the history of any people. It’s about the (completely boloney) ever evolving idea of “whiteness.” It’s a long, sad and occasionally ridiculous story about how privilege was handed out to the chosen. Apparently, there was a time when pale-skinned Irish people were not considered “white.”
It’s an idea that needs to be trashed as soon as possible.
It’s not about the history of any people. It’s about the (completely boloney) ever evolving idea of “whiteness.” It’s a long, sad and occasionally ridiculous story about how privilege was handed out to the chosen. Apparently, there was a time when pale-skinned Irish people were not considered “white.”
It’s an idea that needs to be trashed as soon as possible.
April 3, 2010
As we all have been told, history should not be just one darned thing after another. I’ve seen this attributed to several in various contexts, including Arnold Toynbee and Edna St. Vincent Millay, who would have it worse, that it should be one darned thing over and over. Well, whoever said this needs to be told that such histories make for dull reading.
There are two kinds of histories I like. The first presents a single story in one, big, sweeping, inevitable arc. The second sort presents itself as an episodic anthology; lots of independent stories, which may, but need not relate to one another except by happenstance of overlapping time, place, or cast. So to appreciate this book review, you need to understand that I stopped reading Painter’s 396 page treatise a mere 131 pages in. I then skimmed off and on up to page 235, when I lost interest in it altogether. It should be noted that the illustration which accompanies last Sunday's New York Times' book review sums up Painter's entire analysis:
I think this image neatly sums up what bothered me about this book, and it was a problem I have wrestled with for a couple of weeks. I don’t think it a fault of Painter’s prose style, as she writes in vernacular and can be quite witty. For example at page 4, discussing the impossibility of typing ancient “Scythian” and “Celtic” peoples from the names given them by the Greeks (ostensibly, to indicate unknown stone age peoples to the East and West of Greece, respectively), she writes, “For a sense of this vagueness, recall the naming skills of fifteenth-century Europeans as they looked west in the Americas. Their backs to the Atlantic Ocean, Europeans described sparsely settled people they had never seen before as ‘Indians.’ Such precision regarding faraway, unlettered peoples has been commonplace throughout the ages.” For me, that’s laugh-out-loud-level sarcasm. Such nuggets of entertainment helped to keep me skimming a third of the way through.
Nor do I think the problem lies in the work’s micro-structure. Like each scene in James Burke’s great BBC series “Connections,” Painter ties together the adjoining paragraphs that bracket each chapter. Thus on page 71 she transitions acceptably from a lengthy discussion of Charles White’s 1799 human chart classifying human skulls by jaw pronation (as compared with various dogs and monkeys) to “others of much greater influence,” such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (coiner of the term “Caucasian”), whose career forms the subject of the following chapter. While occasionally a visible technique, it does keep things rolling along for the reader.
Rather, I think the problem lies in the static nature of what I understood to be the way in which her thesis, to wit, that people are basically xenophobic animals in real or imagined competition with one another played out linearly and without any real direction. The concept of race is a relatively recent fiction (it appears to have emerged in the nineteenth century to make the wealthy, powerful, and would-be wealthy-and-powerful feel good about themselves), meaningless from a genetic perspective, but still damning from a cultural point-of-view (especially in the U.S.). As a label, “white” people have come to be defined only by what they are not, and the moniker appears to have been appropriated by a rogue’s gallery of well- and ill-intentioned people for various unrelated purposes throughout the past 200-odd years. Precisely what “white” connotes is different from one writer, anthropologist, economist, politician, or propagandist to the next, but Painter never bothers to impose order on these apparently random jots. Where there is no pattern, there is only noise – by definition “one damned thing after another.” Frankly, I find even white noise tiresome to look at.
I hope it's not just because I'm a shallower doofus than I previously thought, although I suppose I should allow for this possibility as well. I really did enjoy the first 130-or-so pages of Painter's well-written string of events and words before cheating, browsing through the Gilded Age, and finally skipping outright to the final chapter (pp. 382-396) which synopsizes and wraps-up the last two decades in Where the Girls Are-style by dissecting contemporary pop cultural iconography and in the process shifting the book’s purpose from that of defining “white”ness to identifying a “typical” American at the bottom of page 389. (Fortunately, it takes only seven pages of meandering prose to reach Painter's observation that today's American is anyone not dark-skinned and poor. And with such a whimper does this book come to an end, as this marks less a conclusion to racial thought in the US than a digressive stopping place.)
Well, alright, so The History of White People is not in the end about the tortured journey of a single obsolete (if annoyingly persistent) idea. Nell Irvin Painter appears to have scrupulously researched and thoroughly annotated her work; it will almost certainly make a fine secondary source for high school students researching any historical author or writings who have individuated people by physiognomy. To the extent that Painter has compiled these various maunderings thoroughly, for the first time, and in one place, White People is an important contribution to historical literature. At least intellectually, (if not culturally, socially, or politically) biology and history each seem to demonstrate “racial” distinctions are not only superficial, but most often flat-out wrong-headed. We assume distinctions where none exist (between whites and non-whites in the Americas) and find homogeneity where variety reigns (among peoples throughout Africa). Call me shallow, but if I could only have found a copy of Martin Mull’s similarly-titled book (and television special!) to enjoy simultaneously, perhaps I might have made it cover to cover through Painter's.
There are two kinds of histories I like. The first presents a single story in one, big, sweeping, inevitable arc. The second sort presents itself as an episodic anthology; lots of independent stories, which may, but need not relate to one another except by happenstance of overlapping time, place, or cast. So to appreciate this book review, you need to understand that I stopped reading Painter’s 396 page treatise a mere 131 pages in. I then skimmed off and on up to page 235, when I lost interest in it altogether. It should be noted that the illustration which accompanies last Sunday's New York Times' book review sums up Painter's entire analysis:
I think this image neatly sums up what bothered me about this book, and it was a problem I have wrestled with for a couple of weeks. I don’t think it a fault of Painter’s prose style, as she writes in vernacular and can be quite witty. For example at page 4, discussing the impossibility of typing ancient “Scythian” and “Celtic” peoples from the names given them by the Greeks (ostensibly, to indicate unknown stone age peoples to the East and West of Greece, respectively), she writes, “For a sense of this vagueness, recall the naming skills of fifteenth-century Europeans as they looked west in the Americas. Their backs to the Atlantic Ocean, Europeans described sparsely settled people they had never seen before as ‘Indians.’ Such precision regarding faraway, unlettered peoples has been commonplace throughout the ages.” For me, that’s laugh-out-loud-level sarcasm. Such nuggets of entertainment helped to keep me skimming a third of the way through.
Nor do I think the problem lies in the work’s micro-structure. Like each scene in James Burke’s great BBC series “Connections,” Painter ties together the adjoining paragraphs that bracket each chapter. Thus on page 71 she transitions acceptably from a lengthy discussion of Charles White’s 1799 human chart classifying human skulls by jaw pronation (as compared with various dogs and monkeys) to “others of much greater influence,” such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (coiner of the term “Caucasian”), whose career forms the subject of the following chapter. While occasionally a visible technique, it does keep things rolling along for the reader.
Rather, I think the problem lies in the static nature of what I understood to be the way in which her thesis, to wit, that people are basically xenophobic animals in real or imagined competition with one another played out linearly and without any real direction. The concept of race is a relatively recent fiction (it appears to have emerged in the nineteenth century to make the wealthy, powerful, and would-be wealthy-and-powerful feel good about themselves), meaningless from a genetic perspective, but still damning from a cultural point-of-view (especially in the U.S.). As a label, “white” people have come to be defined only by what they are not, and the moniker appears to have been appropriated by a rogue’s gallery of well- and ill-intentioned people for various unrelated purposes throughout the past 200-odd years. Precisely what “white” connotes is different from one writer, anthropologist, economist, politician, or propagandist to the next, but Painter never bothers to impose order on these apparently random jots. Where there is no pattern, there is only noise – by definition “one damned thing after another.” Frankly, I find even white noise tiresome to look at.
I hope it's not just because I'm a shallower doofus than I previously thought, although I suppose I should allow for this possibility as well. I really did enjoy the first 130-or-so pages of Painter's well-written string of events and words before cheating, browsing through the Gilded Age, and finally skipping outright to the final chapter (pp. 382-396) which synopsizes and wraps-up the last two decades in Where the Girls Are-style by dissecting contemporary pop cultural iconography and in the process shifting the book’s purpose from that of defining “white”ness to identifying a “typical” American at the bottom of page 389. (Fortunately, it takes only seven pages of meandering prose to reach Painter's observation that today's American is anyone not dark-skinned and poor. And with such a whimper does this book come to an end, as this marks less a conclusion to racial thought in the US than a digressive stopping place.)
Well, alright, so The History of White People is not in the end about the tortured journey of a single obsolete (if annoyingly persistent) idea. Nell Irvin Painter appears to have scrupulously researched and thoroughly annotated her work; it will almost certainly make a fine secondary source for high school students researching any historical author or writings who have individuated people by physiognomy. To the extent that Painter has compiled these various maunderings thoroughly, for the first time, and in one place, White People is an important contribution to historical literature. At least intellectually, (if not culturally, socially, or politically) biology and history each seem to demonstrate “racial” distinctions are not only superficial, but most often flat-out wrong-headed. We assume distinctions where none exist (between whites and non-whites in the Americas) and find homogeneity where variety reigns (among peoples throughout Africa). Call me shallow, but if I could only have found a copy of Martin Mull’s similarly-titled book (and television special!) to enjoy simultaneously, perhaps I might have made it cover to cover through Painter's.
August 27, 2017
“Evolutionary biologists now reckon that the six to seven billion people now living share the same small number of ancestors living two or three thousand years ago. These circumstances make nonsense of anybody’s pretensions to find a pure racial ancestry.”
I have had a really good reading year. I am, once again, mostly retired and my reading list shows this. I have not only had time to read, but time to concentrate on some tough subjects. My brain is willing to slow down and try to understand some of the current issues.
The hard part is that I have not kept up with my reviews. I still believe that writing about the books I read is helpful. I am able to synthesize some of what I have read and when I look back at my reviews I can remember what I read. Unfortunately, I am not writing the reviews that I need the most. Books like The History of White People, are the most challenging to my world view and they are also the hardest reviews to write. There is so much to absorb in this book. I really should have started over when I finished last May. I know that there is a lot that Painter said that I just didn’t absorb.
It has been almost four months since I read this incredible history. Painter shows her readers that white history is based on lies, misunderstandings and deliberate fabrications. Our world’s history keeps being written over and over again to support racist ideas. I found this to be mind-blowing. Too bad all the history teachers I had in my school career did not make their subject as interesting as Painter does. I might have known some of this before now.
I know that it is futile to expect many people to read Painter’s excellent history. It is not an easy read and anyone who is really paying attention would have to re-examine why they believe that there are different races in our world. However, if you care about how you look at this world and want to think carefully about how you have been influenced in your viewpoint, I highly recommend this book.
I have had a really good reading year. I am, once again, mostly retired and my reading list shows this. I have not only had time to read, but time to concentrate on some tough subjects. My brain is willing to slow down and try to understand some of the current issues.
The hard part is that I have not kept up with my reviews. I still believe that writing about the books I read is helpful. I am able to synthesize some of what I have read and when I look back at my reviews I can remember what I read. Unfortunately, I am not writing the reviews that I need the most. Books like The History of White People, are the most challenging to my world view and they are also the hardest reviews to write. There is so much to absorb in this book. I really should have started over when I finished last May. I know that there is a lot that Painter said that I just didn’t absorb.
It has been almost four months since I read this incredible history. Painter shows her readers that white history is based on lies, misunderstandings and deliberate fabrications. Our world’s history keeps being written over and over again to support racist ideas. I found this to be mind-blowing. Too bad all the history teachers I had in my school career did not make their subject as interesting as Painter does. I might have known some of this before now.
I know that it is futile to expect many people to read Painter’s excellent history. It is not an easy read and anyone who is really paying attention would have to re-examine why they believe that there are different races in our world. However, if you care about how you look at this world and want to think carefully about how you have been influenced in your viewpoint, I highly recommend this book.
May 17, 2010
As someone who did historical research on the concept of perceived race and race perceptions regarding "whiteness," this is one of the most important and comprehensive books written on the subject in the last decade. Painter covers a broad historical range, but focuses mainly on American perceptions of whiteness. While I'm sure European perceptions have changed throughout time, America presents the ideal catalyst for changing perceptions of race, etc.
This book is filled to the brim with information, it is not a light read, nor is it something for the casual reader of history/non-fiction. However, I still highly recommend it for anyone interested in their heritage, and why certain people were treated the way they were in American history. This is a particularly poignant piece of scholarship given the current issues of race and immigration in America. It needs to be read, studied, and talked about.
The reviewer is a 2009 graduate of Kent State University's Master of Library and Information Sciences program, an alumna of Antioch College, and the author of the blog A Librarian's Life in Books.
This book is filled to the brim with information, it is not a light read, nor is it something for the casual reader of history/non-fiction. However, I still highly recommend it for anyone interested in their heritage, and why certain people were treated the way they were in American history. This is a particularly poignant piece of scholarship given the current issues of race and immigration in America. It needs to be read, studied, and talked about.
The reviewer is a 2009 graduate of Kent State University's Master of Library and Information Sciences program, an alumna of Antioch College, and the author of the blog A Librarian's Life in Books.
June 9, 2010
Do you think you're white? If your ancestors came from the western side of the British Isles, France, Spain, or southern Germany, little more than a century ago you would not have been considered white. Irish? Italian? Jewish? Most definitely not. African-American? Asian? Native American? Off the charts and beyond consideration. Painter documents centuries of scientific inquiry--measuring skull size and shape, eugenics and social Darwinism, intelligence testing, all of which were bent to confirm the notion that certain western Europeans where destined to rule the world. From the laughable--18th-century archeologists seemed unable or unwilling to see the paint on ancient Greek sculpture, so the ancient Greeks must have been "white"--to the monstrous extermination of the Jews and other "degenerates" of the Third Reich, Painter looks at racism through the prism of whiteness. Thorough end notes and indexing provide plenty of documentation without interfering with a fascinating read. Strongly recommended for patrons looking for meaty, but not dry, nonfiction.
March 22, 2014
"And in the genetic sense all people-and all Americans-are African descended." P. 391
To recognize in 2014 that race was/is a social construct, does not take an abundance of mental capability. So perhaps the book is mis-titled, it is not a history of white people per se, but more a look at how the notion of whiteness became a symbol of power and privilege. To the author's credit she admits as much in her opening sentence, "I might have entitled this book Constructions of White Americans from Antiquity to the Present, because it explores a concept that lies within a history of events." In this history, she traces the building of the race concept from antiquity to present day, and how race has functioned in the lives of white people and subsequently in the lives of people of color.
What I think readers will find fascinating is the various theories that passed for legitimate science over the centuries. Beginning with Hippocrates' theory of "topology and water determine body type," right on through the myriad cranial capacity concepts and skull collecting and measurements it is indeed mind boggling. One scholar in 1887 states; "I am convinced that in the next century people will slaughter each other by the millions because of a difference of a degree or two in the cephalic index." P. 312 Bizarre!
It seems like there was always an attempt to distinguish groups of people on a hierarchical basis. This need to be supreme was aided by junk science written by "scholars" with dubious credentials. You will meet a bevy of them in this work and some of their postulates will leave you shaking your head. All of this didn't start with African people, it begin amongst the various "races" of Europe. It grew to a White vs. Black thing over centuries, with the obvious difference in skin color and phenotype taking center stage, and as more of the white "races" morphed into a general whiteness, any and everything Black was persona non grata, so much so that the stamp of American was still withheld from African-Americans, while recent immigrants were instantly granted American status based on their whiteness.
What has all this wrought and are we any better situated now? She concludes, "the fundamental black/white binary endures, even though the category of whiteness-or we might say more precisely, a category of nonblackness-effectively expands."
The book is written in an academic manner, so some readers may find it slow going, but there is a wealth of information contained within, with historical and scientific tidbits sprinkled throughout that help maintain a level of interest and tepid continuance. It definitely is worth the effort.
To recognize in 2014 that race was/is a social construct, does not take an abundance of mental capability. So perhaps the book is mis-titled, it is not a history of white people per se, but more a look at how the notion of whiteness became a symbol of power and privilege. To the author's credit she admits as much in her opening sentence, "I might have entitled this book Constructions of White Americans from Antiquity to the Present, because it explores a concept that lies within a history of events." In this history, she traces the building of the race concept from antiquity to present day, and how race has functioned in the lives of white people and subsequently in the lives of people of color.
What I think readers will find fascinating is the various theories that passed for legitimate science over the centuries. Beginning with Hippocrates' theory of "topology and water determine body type," right on through the myriad cranial capacity concepts and skull collecting and measurements it is indeed mind boggling. One scholar in 1887 states; "I am convinced that in the next century people will slaughter each other by the millions because of a difference of a degree or two in the cephalic index." P. 312 Bizarre!
It seems like there was always an attempt to distinguish groups of people on a hierarchical basis. This need to be supreme was aided by junk science written by "scholars" with dubious credentials. You will meet a bevy of them in this work and some of their postulates will leave you shaking your head. All of this didn't start with African people, it begin amongst the various "races" of Europe. It grew to a White vs. Black thing over centuries, with the obvious difference in skin color and phenotype taking center stage, and as more of the white "races" morphed into a general whiteness, any and everything Black was persona non grata, so much so that the stamp of American was still withheld from African-Americans, while recent immigrants were instantly granted American status based on their whiteness.
What has all this wrought and are we any better situated now? She concludes, "the fundamental black/white binary endures, even though the category of whiteness-or we might say more precisely, a category of nonblackness-effectively expands."
The book is written in an academic manner, so some readers may find it slow going, but there is a wealth of information contained within, with historical and scientific tidbits sprinkled throughout that help maintain a level of interest and tepid continuance. It definitely is worth the effort.
October 28, 2015
I'd picked up Painter expecting, in retrospect, something more of a timeline of social movements and attitudes. Like, say, Irish people became White in 1920, Jews in 1950. Instead, it's an intellectual history of the U.S./American idea of whiteness, with a prologue on ancient attitudes toward the Circassian or Caucasian "types" as a grounding for modern race theory. The archive Painter is working from, full of French and German and New England aristocrats holding forth on the value of good breeding, is difficult and clearly rather dull. She makes up for it with heavy irony, which I found a bit wearing but did keep her voice from drying out too much.
Ideally, I'd have liked even more to see a book that filled in the gap between Tacitus and the modern slave trade, and one with a bit more of a global vision. It's a U.S. story here, nothing about even close analogues like South Africa or Australia or even India. If anything, it felt like a heavily worked-out syllabus for a seminar in "American Whiteness", which it turns out is exactly what Painter teaches at Princeton. That said, I learned a good deal about the American story, especially the mythology of "Anglo-Saxon" America and the details of anti-immigrant racism in the early 20th c.
Ideally, I'd have liked even more to see a book that filled in the gap between Tacitus and the modern slave trade, and one with a bit more of a global vision. It's a U.S. story here, nothing about even close analogues like South Africa or Australia or even India. If anything, it felt like a heavily worked-out syllabus for a seminar in "American Whiteness", which it turns out is exactly what Painter teaches at Princeton. That said, I learned a good deal about the American story, especially the mythology of "Anglo-Saxon" America and the details of anti-immigrant racism in the early 20th c.
September 2, 2019
I was disappointed. Fascinating topic, but the writing is very pedestrian and the content felt bland. Part of it may be that intellectual history is not my thing, but Painter also seemed to do a particularly clunky job of wedding her very detailed exegesis of what this or that writer or academic was saying about race in a certain time period with a few broad and unsatisfying paragraphs about what was going on in society at the same time. The footnotes were irritating, too - not quirky enough to be interesting (eg the person she was writing about was also an assistant baseball coach), but omnipresent.
June 9, 2012
"Race is an illusion. But racism is real." These words most closely capture the essence of this important book.
By tracing the ever-changing concept of race and "whiteness" through history, Painter unveils the tortured path that has led us to the irrational racial paradigm widely accepted in the U.S. of the 21st century.
For those who think White, Black, Asian and Hispanic are "races," this book is a must-read. Unfortunately, this includes the bulk of today's journalists, educators and media professionals.
By tracing the ever-changing concept of race and "whiteness" through history, Painter unveils the tortured path that has led us to the irrational racial paradigm widely accepted in the U.S. of the 21st century.
For those who think White, Black, Asian and Hispanic are "races," this book is a must-read. Unfortunately, this includes the bulk of today's journalists, educators and media professionals.
July 13, 2011
When my kid was three, he came home from preschool and rattled on prosaically about a new friend who had just started school. Then he got poetic; his new friend wore a red shirt, had curly hair and his skin was colored with a different crayon.
That's all race is to my kid; a matter of pigment.
Nell Irvin Painter's book, boldly and sensationally entitled A History of White People makes this same point but with many (many) more words and a lot of history backing it up. Her main point seems to be "What we can see depends on what our culture has trained us to look for." Hence race.
Slaves weren't always black, of course. Even the word "slave" comes from "slav" because after the plague wiped out most of Europe, those kind and generous Christian Crusaders (an oxymoron for the ages) enslaved unfortunates in the Balkans. The pilgrims, hailed as lovers of freedom, brought indentured servants with them; all white. The first US census didn't have a category for unfree white persons, though there were many. But the simple fact that "free" needed to be a qualifier for the other categories (free white males, free white females) alludes to the nonfree status of many whites who were still in servitude. Tracking the categories of each census probably makes for an interesting study (though Painter didn't not go into detail) about the genesis of race ideals in the United States. Then we eventually get to the idea that one is not white if one's blood is tainted. By the time Toqueville wrote Democracy in America this flight of odd fancy was fully developed; Toqueville's traveling partner, Beaumont, also wrote a book that pointed out some of the hypocrisy of enslaved peoples in a country where all men are created equals; "white Americans belong to a hereditary aristocracy by dint of a mythology driven by the notion of tainted blood and a belief in invisible ancestry."
Tracing the prejudice against immigrants is enlightening, too; our bad guys keep changing. Those nasty hispanics were considered "white" for many years while the American people were harping on about the Irish Catholic dregs muddying up the pool. Now Irish Catholics are perpetrating violence against hispanic immigrants. Interesting.
Then there's the idea of racial purity; in the 1850s, French aristocrat Gobineau wrote an essay about race that spoke warmly of racial mixing. "...Gobineau says quite clearly that Africans contribute positively to the mixture of races in prosperous metropolitan centers by offering Dionysian gifts such as passion, dance, music, rhythm, lightheartedness, and sensuality. Whites, for their part, contribute energy, action, perseverance, rationality, and technical aptitude." While Gobineau obviously sees whites as superior, they still need the contributions of other races to best develop civilization. Of course, Josiah Nott, who translated Gobineau's writings for distribution in English was denounced by Gobineau, as Nott took much of the positive language about nonwhite races out of the work.
Then there's anti-Semitism. And head measurements. And attempts to classify physical characteristics of each race. A whole rigamarole. Teddy Roosevelt freely spoke of "race suicide" and worried aloud about the declining birthrate among old-stock New Englanders. "If all our nice friends in Beacon Street, Newport, and Fifth Avenue, and Philadelphia, have one child, or no child at all, while all the Finnegans, Hooligans, Antonios, Mandelbaums and Rabinskis have eight, or nine, or ten - it's simply a question of the multiplication table. How are you going to get away from it?"
But by the 1920s, race hysteria has become the sign of the weak-minded hypocrite; Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby goes on quite a tear about whites being the dominant race, based on writings that were considered gospel just a few years before. His tirade is met with winking flapper disdain; he is "nothing but a boor whose Nordic chauvinism signals his boorishness." And Irish Catholics were white and not a danger (using their intelligence to rock the system by actually voting and filling the government with people to lobby for their eventual inclusion as true Americans).
By the 1940s, the watchword was "cultural pluralism." Henry Ford and his melting pot ran parallel to this, the idea that "ethnic types" would become Anglo-Saxons by giving up talismans of their culture and identity like language, clothing and food. He even had a program at his engineered-society-car-manufacturing-plant where the ethnics would wear their native clothing and walk up stairs towards a huge paper-mache melting pot. They would come out the other side in American clothing, waving American flags. Reeducation at its finest.
Notice Asians aren't even in the picture yet? Yeah. They were worse than blacks. Until the 1960s; now they are considered smarter and richer than native-born American whites.
And that's not even scratching the surface of what Painter is trying to convey. Her subject is a big one and impossible to encapsulate in 400 pages. Her lines of reasoning could also use a clearer sense of beginning, middle and end. She structures her book chronologically and because she tried to cover so much information, points were potentially lost. For example, she introduced Gobineau and Nott and then left them. By the time she returned to Gobineau (to make the point that it was he that developed the word "Aryan" and it was another, more faithful translation that inspired the Nazis to adopt the term) you had forgotten who Gobineau was ... a chapter on Gobineau and how he was interpreted through time would have been more helpful.
And perhaps the whole book might have been structured that way; a chapter on the genesis of Irish Catholics. A chapter on Jews in America. Etc.
But, overall, a thoughtful book worth reading.
Or you could just read the following sentences and get the gist; "Incessant human migration has made us all multiracial. Nonetheless, poverty in a dark skin endures as the opposite of whiteness, driven by an age-old social yearning to characterize the poor as permanently other and inherently inferior."
That's all race is to my kid; a matter of pigment.
Nell Irvin Painter's book, boldly and sensationally entitled A History of White People makes this same point but with many (many) more words and a lot of history backing it up. Her main point seems to be "What we can see depends on what our culture has trained us to look for." Hence race.
Slaves weren't always black, of course. Even the word "slave" comes from "slav" because after the plague wiped out most of Europe, those kind and generous Christian Crusaders (an oxymoron for the ages) enslaved unfortunates in the Balkans. The pilgrims, hailed as lovers of freedom, brought indentured servants with them; all white. The first US census didn't have a category for unfree white persons, though there were many. But the simple fact that "free" needed to be a qualifier for the other categories (free white males, free white females) alludes to the nonfree status of many whites who were still in servitude. Tracking the categories of each census probably makes for an interesting study (though Painter didn't not go into detail) about the genesis of race ideals in the United States. Then we eventually get to the idea that one is not white if one's blood is tainted. By the time Toqueville wrote Democracy in America this flight of odd fancy was fully developed; Toqueville's traveling partner, Beaumont, also wrote a book that pointed out some of the hypocrisy of enslaved peoples in a country where all men are created equals; "white Americans belong to a hereditary aristocracy by dint of a mythology driven by the notion of tainted blood and a belief in invisible ancestry."
Tracing the prejudice against immigrants is enlightening, too; our bad guys keep changing. Those nasty hispanics were considered "white" for many years while the American people were harping on about the Irish Catholic dregs muddying up the pool. Now Irish Catholics are perpetrating violence against hispanic immigrants. Interesting.
Then there's the idea of racial purity; in the 1850s, French aristocrat Gobineau wrote an essay about race that spoke warmly of racial mixing. "...Gobineau says quite clearly that Africans contribute positively to the mixture of races in prosperous metropolitan centers by offering Dionysian gifts such as passion, dance, music, rhythm, lightheartedness, and sensuality. Whites, for their part, contribute energy, action, perseverance, rationality, and technical aptitude." While Gobineau obviously sees whites as superior, they still need the contributions of other races to best develop civilization. Of course, Josiah Nott, who translated Gobineau's writings for distribution in English was denounced by Gobineau, as Nott took much of the positive language about nonwhite races out of the work.
Then there's anti-Semitism. And head measurements. And attempts to classify physical characteristics of each race. A whole rigamarole. Teddy Roosevelt freely spoke of "race suicide" and worried aloud about the declining birthrate among old-stock New Englanders. "If all our nice friends in Beacon Street, Newport, and Fifth Avenue, and Philadelphia, have one child, or no child at all, while all the Finnegans, Hooligans, Antonios, Mandelbaums and Rabinskis have eight, or nine, or ten - it's simply a question of the multiplication table. How are you going to get away from it?"
But by the 1920s, race hysteria has become the sign of the weak-minded hypocrite; Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby goes on quite a tear about whites being the dominant race, based on writings that were considered gospel just a few years before. His tirade is met with winking flapper disdain; he is "nothing but a boor whose Nordic chauvinism signals his boorishness." And Irish Catholics were white and not a danger (using their intelligence to rock the system by actually voting and filling the government with people to lobby for their eventual inclusion as true Americans).
By the 1940s, the watchword was "cultural pluralism." Henry Ford and his melting pot ran parallel to this, the idea that "ethnic types" would become Anglo-Saxons by giving up talismans of their culture and identity like language, clothing and food. He even had a program at his engineered-society-car-manufacturing-plant where the ethnics would wear their native clothing and walk up stairs towards a huge paper-mache melting pot. They would come out the other side in American clothing, waving American flags. Reeducation at its finest.
Notice Asians aren't even in the picture yet? Yeah. They were worse than blacks. Until the 1960s; now they are considered smarter and richer than native-born American whites.
And that's not even scratching the surface of what Painter is trying to convey. Her subject is a big one and impossible to encapsulate in 400 pages. Her lines of reasoning could also use a clearer sense of beginning, middle and end. She structures her book chronologically and because she tried to cover so much information, points were potentially lost. For example, she introduced Gobineau and Nott and then left them. By the time she returned to Gobineau (to make the point that it was he that developed the word "Aryan" and it was another, more faithful translation that inspired the Nazis to adopt the term) you had forgotten who Gobineau was ... a chapter on Gobineau and how he was interpreted through time would have been more helpful.
And perhaps the whole book might have been structured that way; a chapter on the genesis of Irish Catholics. A chapter on Jews in America. Etc.
But, overall, a thoughtful book worth reading.
Or you could just read the following sentences and get the gist; "Incessant human migration has made us all multiracial. Nonetheless, poverty in a dark skin endures as the opposite of whiteness, driven by an age-old social yearning to characterize the poor as permanently other and inherently inferior."
August 24, 2015
Being personally a descendant of the Vikings (on my father's side) and conquistadors (maternally), on one fine autumn day in the fourteenth year of the postracial 21st century I decided to settle down with a glass of wine and have a nice reminisce about the glory days when my people still held the power in this country. Fellow Americans, I recommend you pick a stronger drink.
The book gets off to a bit of a slow start, talking at first about long forgotten times (antiquity, when skin color wasn't really a thing; centuries and centuries of white slavery, including the female sex slaves from whom notions of ideal white beauty originated around the 17th century). But when we get to Murica (and while I appreciate the attempts at comprehensiveness, this is really The History of White People in America) things start to get really interesting. Although one of the many bizarre facts I learned is how crazy and Scientology-like Nation of Islam doctrine is (everyone used to be black—so that part is actually true—but NOI holds that white people were invented by a mad black scientist who was punishing certain miscreants for their wickedness), it seems like "white devils" really did abound. For many chapters, though, discrimination and abuse directed against African Americans is little mentioned, because what racists (including race "scientists") were obsessed with throughout the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries—until what Painter calls "the third enlargement of American whiteness" in the mid-20th century—was actually all the different "races" of white people. (My post-third-enlargement upbringing has conditioned me to put "race" there in parentheses, as though, biologically speaking, it's inaccurate to talk of white people belonging to separate races but there really is such thing as separate races, when in fact SPOILER ALERT!: race is not real. Or it's maybe .01% real.) It would seem that for a long time, the field of anthropology consisted of rich white men measuring the "cephalic indexes" (long narrow head = "dolichocephalic" = good; short round head = "brachycephalic" = bad), skin and hair color, and stature of people from different parts of Europe. Despite the fact that these randomly selected traits, like basically any other human traits, don't strongly correlate with each other or with a particular geographic region, our species has an incredible talent for believing whatever we would like to believe and what feels good, and in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries it felt REALLY good to rich white people to compile hundreds of pages of charts and tables purporting that there are three, or four, or five European races, with names like "Alpine," "Mediterranean," and "Teutonic" or "Nordic" or "Anglo-Saxon." And, because we are all little Mendelian peas and various physical and personality traits are passed down as units by race, it follows that (overwhelming numbers of documented counterexamples be damned) the uniformly smartest, tallest, strongest, longheadedist (see "smartest"; more space for the brain), most virile (well, unless we feel like panicking about the fecundity of inferior races), are the Anglo-Saxons/Teutons/Nordics. If this sounds like a confusing category to you, let me enlighten: this is the distinct group of people that originated in Scandinavia, but are their descendants really those pansy ass, poor (in the 19th century) modern Swedes and Norwegians of today? NO sir! They evolved their lily white skin, brains, brutality, civilization, blonde and blue eyed beauty, etc. in those countries, and then the best of them left to run the rest of the world, specifically settling in England and then, later, in America. Oh, plus Jesus. Jesus was Anglo-Saxon. (I'm not even making this shit up.) Except, OOPS, what to do with all those racially pure Anglo-Saxon Americans who lived in poverty-stricken squalor no different than the hated masses of Irish, Slavs, Jews, Poles, etc.? Could this be a reason to implicate environment, rather than genes, as a causal factor in individual human destiny? No, no, it's just that certain corruptions—usually originating with a patriarch's copulation with a prostitute spawning illegitimate offspring—tainted our good stock with a hereditary degenerate strain causing the proliferation of criminals, welfare recipients, and prostitutes even within the glorious Anglo-Saxon spectrum. The study of these "degenerate families" (given pseudonyms like "Jukes" and "Kallaks") led to the widespread practice of forced government sterilization in the early twentieth century. In America. Not Nazi Germany. Here. The U.S. Supreme Court declared in 1924 in an 8-1 decision, in the case Buck v. Bell, that it is OK to forcibly deprive people of their ability to procreate. In the immortal words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Three generations of imbeciles is enough." (Except not so immortal, because I definitely never learned about this in school.) Apparently Buck was actually not so much mentally disabled as traumatized by her recent sexual abuse in a foster home when the IQ test was administered. Whoops.
But don't trust my not very rigorous or scholarly account—read this wonderful book! I promise, it's not as depressing as it sounds, because it's too entertaining. Impossible to put down, like watching a car crash. Like the really entertaining Hollywood version of a car crash, except actually true. It is all true. And I wish it was required reading. I'd always heard in school or whatever that we used to not like the Irish, but there's nothing like reading in detail about the history of racist discrimination against white people and European immigrants for putting contemporary (subtle) hate speech against nonwhites and against Hispanic immigrants into perspective. While it's great that Obama and Beyonce are now considered real Americans, at least to some people (it's good to be hot and rich), I think that full inclusion for all groups is going to be slow process without the knowledge of the vital history that Painter so compellingly presents.
The book gets off to a bit of a slow start, talking at first about long forgotten times (antiquity, when skin color wasn't really a thing; centuries and centuries of white slavery, including the female sex slaves from whom notions of ideal white beauty originated around the 17th century). But when we get to Murica (and while I appreciate the attempts at comprehensiveness, this is really The History of White People in America) things start to get really interesting. Although one of the many bizarre facts I learned is how crazy and Scientology-like Nation of Islam doctrine is (everyone used to be black—so that part is actually true—but NOI holds that white people were invented by a mad black scientist who was punishing certain miscreants for their wickedness), it seems like "white devils" really did abound. For many chapters, though, discrimination and abuse directed against African Americans is little mentioned, because what racists (including race "scientists") were obsessed with throughout the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries—until what Painter calls "the third enlargement of American whiteness" in the mid-20th century—was actually all the different "races" of white people. (My post-third-enlargement upbringing has conditioned me to put "race" there in parentheses, as though, biologically speaking, it's inaccurate to talk of white people belonging to separate races but there really is such thing as separate races, when in fact SPOILER ALERT!: race is not real. Or it's maybe .01% real.) It would seem that for a long time, the field of anthropology consisted of rich white men measuring the "cephalic indexes" (long narrow head = "dolichocephalic" = good; short round head = "brachycephalic" = bad), skin and hair color, and stature of people from different parts of Europe. Despite the fact that these randomly selected traits, like basically any other human traits, don't strongly correlate with each other or with a particular geographic region, our species has an incredible talent for believing whatever we would like to believe and what feels good, and in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries it felt REALLY good to rich white people to compile hundreds of pages of charts and tables purporting that there are three, or four, or five European races, with names like "Alpine," "Mediterranean," and "Teutonic" or "Nordic" or "Anglo-Saxon." And, because we are all little Mendelian peas and various physical and personality traits are passed down as units by race, it follows that (overwhelming numbers of documented counterexamples be damned) the uniformly smartest, tallest, strongest, longheadedist (see "smartest"; more space for the brain), most virile (well, unless we feel like panicking about the fecundity of inferior races), are the Anglo-Saxons/Teutons/Nordics. If this sounds like a confusing category to you, let me enlighten: this is the distinct group of people that originated in Scandinavia, but are their descendants really those pansy ass, poor (in the 19th century) modern Swedes and Norwegians of today? NO sir! They evolved their lily white skin, brains, brutality, civilization, blonde and blue eyed beauty, etc. in those countries, and then the best of them left to run the rest of the world, specifically settling in England and then, later, in America. Oh, plus Jesus. Jesus was Anglo-Saxon. (I'm not even making this shit up.) Except, OOPS, what to do with all those racially pure Anglo-Saxon Americans who lived in poverty-stricken squalor no different than the hated masses of Irish, Slavs, Jews, Poles, etc.? Could this be a reason to implicate environment, rather than genes, as a causal factor in individual human destiny? No, no, it's just that certain corruptions—usually originating with a patriarch's copulation with a prostitute spawning illegitimate offspring—tainted our good stock with a hereditary degenerate strain causing the proliferation of criminals, welfare recipients, and prostitutes even within the glorious Anglo-Saxon spectrum. The study of these "degenerate families" (given pseudonyms like "Jukes" and "Kallaks") led to the widespread practice of forced government sterilization in the early twentieth century. In America. Not Nazi Germany. Here. The U.S. Supreme Court declared in 1924 in an 8-1 decision, in the case Buck v. Bell, that it is OK to forcibly deprive people of their ability to procreate. In the immortal words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Three generations of imbeciles is enough." (Except not so immortal, because I definitely never learned about this in school.) Apparently Buck was actually not so much mentally disabled as traumatized by her recent sexual abuse in a foster home when the IQ test was administered. Whoops.
But don't trust my not very rigorous or scholarly account—read this wonderful book! I promise, it's not as depressing as it sounds, because it's too entertaining. Impossible to put down, like watching a car crash. Like the really entertaining Hollywood version of a car crash, except actually true. It is all true. And I wish it was required reading. I'd always heard in school or whatever that we used to not like the Irish, but there's nothing like reading in detail about the history of racist discrimination against white people and European immigrants for putting contemporary (subtle) hate speech against nonwhites and against Hispanic immigrants into perspective. While it's great that Obama and Beyonce are now considered real Americans, at least to some people (it's good to be hot and rich), I think that full inclusion for all groups is going to be slow process without the knowledge of the vital history that Painter so compellingly presents.
March 9, 2018
My reading experience was DESTROYED by the publicity for this book: from the title, which must have been imposed by an agent or editor, to the silly levels of praise ("mind-expanding and myth-destroying"). That's a shame, because the book is okay for what it is: a recounting of the various ways people have defined 'white people,' in America. Any time the book leaves America, it becomes tedious at best; the opening chapters on the ancients are unnecessary; the enormous chapter on de Stael is entirely unnecessary and more than a little irritating. But it will be well worth your time to start at chapter 9, and then, if you care to, go back to read about the ties between beauty and whiteness in the 18th century.
January 12, 2021
Very interesting and readable history of how white as a race developed through time with a focus on the United States. Science played a larger role than I expected. And of course, in spite of the unscientific nature of all the "studies" and in spite of real evidence that contradicted everything, excuses and reasons were always found or the data that didn't work was just left out or dismissed. Really fascinating learning about how the Irish, who as Celts were not considered white, eventually became white. Same with Italians. And the arguments between the different whites "races" were absurd because you could be white, but not the right kind of white. The saddest thing though is how all this crap still goes on today.
December 6, 2023
A bit dry but very informative.
March 19, 2016
Nell Irvin Painter‘s most recent text, The History of White People, dives deeply into the concept of race. With a solid foundation in the research, Painter attempts to find out when, why, where (and by who) humans began differentiating themselves by skin color. It felt more like a journey than anything else: Painter cuddled me into a time machine that dated back to Ancient Greece where it is confirmed that human beings were (once upon a time) identified solely based off of geographical location and tribe. It is through the beginning pages that she awakens her reader, sets the pace and informs that “race is an idea, not a fact.” Utilizing this perspective (one I agree with), Painter provides her reader with the option to witness the evolution of a simple thought and how it transformed an entire civilization.
The tone of the text isn’t angry or frustrated. Instead, Painter communicates from a place of humorous and witty wisdom. She confronts many white “scholars” and their research with an effortless ease while also laughing at the absurdity of their churned results.
The History of White People is just that: history.
Through the expedition, Nell Irvin Painter takes us through the rise and fall of these bad ideas, how they were encouraged and (most importantly) how they were defied. She writes about the repugnant process of social engineering and ends on a sad, familiar note: not much has changed.
The tone of the text isn’t angry or frustrated. Instead, Painter communicates from a place of humorous and witty wisdom. She confronts many white “scholars” and their research with an effortless ease while also laughing at the absurdity of their churned results.
The History of White People is just that: history.
Through the expedition, Nell Irvin Painter takes us through the rise and fall of these bad ideas, how they were encouraged and (most importantly) how they were defied. She writes about the repugnant process of social engineering and ends on a sad, familiar note: not much has changed.
July 22, 2014
While Painter's subject is ultimately race in America, she starts in ancient times and works through centuries of racial theory. I have to say that her sarcasms about some of the inane "race" theorists and theories are pretty gentle; I don't think I could have been so even tempered. But her overall portrait is balanced and fair. While I knew she was African-American (if one can use the term after her totally smashing of race theories!) from seeing her head shots on other books I've read, she could have been a Russian Jew, a white Southerner or anything else if you just knew her from the text. She is just as fierce about antisemitism and anti-Irish (and anti-everything else)sentiment as about anti-black. She shows that "whiteness" was often relative to ethnicity and nationality--the Irish were sometimes not considered to be white, for instance.
Just a personal note--I was very sad to read about Emerson's racism. I knew he was an abolitionist (though they were, I know, often racist). It's always a disappointment to have someone you admire shown to be a very fallible human instead with sometimes repulsive attitudes.
I also loved her under-stated sense of humor. Starting with the title, of course.
Just a personal note--I was very sad to read about Emerson's racism. I knew he was an abolitionist (though they were, I know, often racist). It's always a disappointment to have someone you admire shown to be a very fallible human instead with sometimes repulsive attitudes.
I also loved her under-stated sense of humor. Starting with the title, of course.
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