The History of White People

This is a great history of the ever evolving category of “white people” and its ties to “race science”/“scientific racism” (white supremacy masquerading as science), class, beauty, nationalism, evolution, and more.

It shows the fascinating historical lockstep of US nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, white supremacy, controlling the bodily autonomy of women, and anti-labor sentiment. (Why does this all sound so familiar?)

Italians, Jews, Irish, Germans, and other groups of people were, at one point or another, considered “not white” or “not members of the white races” at some points over the last ~300 years by the leading thinkers of the time.

When the white supremacists in power wanted to keep down labor movements, they blamed it on immigrants, immigrants who were not, at the time, considered white. When those in power wanted to “quantify” beauty and intelligence, they conveniently designed their standards in a way that validated their racist beliefs. The women they like were “objectively” the most beautiful. The people like them (those with power) were considered intelligent and those without power were considered “imbeciles” or “feeble minded.”

“Inferior” races are dehumanized, compared to animals. “Superior” races (whatever Western European countries the specific author at the time likes the most) are considered superhuman, divine.

And we can see this in the present when ultra-nationalist former President Trump said in Mexico City while meeting with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador after first visiting Guatemala “I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come.” ...oh...wait.........

The book shows where this always ends up: Eugenics, forced sterilization, genocide. We can see the modern versions of this “race science” as perpetuated by far right extremists like Jordan Peterson a perpetuator of the Bell Curve (a modern racist theory of white supremacy) and “cultural Marxism”, a nonsense phrase literally created by literal nazis.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about their cultural history or want to have a better historical understanding of our modern issues with race, class, and power.

My only criticism is the middle part was a bit of a slog.