The History of White People

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.