The History of White People
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A New York Times bestseller: “This terrific new book . . . [explores] the ‘notion of whiteness,’ an idea as dangerous as it is seductive.”—Boston Globe Telling perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, illuminating not only the invention of race but also the frequent praise of “whiteness” for economic, scientific, and political ends. A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes a huge gap in literature that has long focused on the non-white and forcefully reminds us that the concept of “race” is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed as it has been driven by a long and rich history of events.
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What a read. Painter's work about the concept of whiteness as both historical canard and force is just fascinating. It's also hard to read in the sense that it's constantly hitting you with anachronistic arguements for “race science”–it takes a toll. It's just so tiring to experience the same story of contemporary racism play out over and over again. It took me over a year to finish but it's worth it. The origins of even contemporary attitudes towards whiteness are appallingly arbitrary and owe a large burden to the previous “successes” of craniometry.
Painter's patient prose depicts a history of controlling and expanding “whiteness” that's appalling and yet understandable for how effective it was even among the elites. In fact, it's the scientists and men of power that frequently star in the Yakety Sax pursuit of weaponized whiteness.
My only suggestion is that the title of this book could more appropriately termed “The Invention of Whiteness.”
The history of fragile white men stroking each other's egos with pseudoscience, insisting too much. The book is drily informative with interspersals of bemusingly casual commentary, ironic speech, and belaboured listings of abuse-as-scholarship. The last chapter jumps sixty years, promotes exceptionalism, and asks naive questions for the white gaze.
This book is a fascinating look at how the concept of race has evolved over time. Dr. Painter starts back in ancient times, when the distinction was between Roman and Gaul/German (both terms roughly meaning “barbarian”), rather than based on skin colour. Then, centuries later, “white people” would get used to describe what people in my father's generation would call WASPs, before eventually expanding to cover different races such as Irish, German, Italian, and others at different periods in history.
Dr. Painter repeatedly illustrates the irony of how flexible and inconstant our conception of race is, and yet how firmly it has been planted in the collective psyche of human civilization. Across time and nations, people seem convinced that they know what race is, even if no one can arrive at a good definition of what that is. And it's a concept that still matters, even though, as Painter mentions in the last paragraph, the human genome project declared that there's actually no such biological construct as “race”.
Dr. Painter makes sure to present the material in a scholarly, exhaustively-researched manner, but also writes with a style that's engaging and keeps the reader hooked while reading.
