The History of White People [Paperback]

Nell Irvin Painter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 18, 2011

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. 70 black-and-white illustrations

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Who are white people and where did they come from? Elementary questions with elusive, contradictory, and complicated answers set historian Painter's inquiry into motion. From notions of whiteness in Greek literature to the changing nature of white identity in direct response to Malcolm X and his black power successors, Painter's wide-ranging response is a who's who of racial thinkers and a synoptic guide to their work. Her commodious history of an idea accommodates Caesar; Saint Patrick, history's most famous British slave of the early medieval period; Madame de Staël; and Emerson, the philosopher king of American white race theory. Painter (Sojourner Truth) reviews the diverse cast in their intellectual milieus, linking them to one another across time and language barriers. Conceptions of beauty (ideals of white beauty [became] firmly embedded in the science of race), social science research, and persistent North/South stereotypes prove relevant to defining whiteness. What we can see, the author observes, depends heavily on what our culture has trained us to look for. For the variable, changing, and often capricious definition of whiteness, Painter offers a kaleidoscopic lens. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Painter is the author of Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (1996) and several other scholarly works on the history of slavery and race relations in America, most recently Creating Black Americans (2006). Her latest selection examines the history of “whiteness” as a racial category and rhetorical weapon: who is considered to be “white,” who is not, what such distinctions mean, and how notions of whiteness have morphed over time in response to shifting demographics, aesthetic tastes, and political exigencies. After a brief look at how the ancients conceptualized the differences between European peoples, Painter focuses primarily on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There, the artistic idealization of beautiful white slaves from the Caucasus combined with German Romantic racial theories and lots of spurious science to construct an ideology of white superiority which, picked up by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other race-obsessed American intellectuals, quickly became an essential component of the nation’s uniquely racialized discourse about who could be considered an American. Presenting vivid psychological portraits of Emerson and dozens of other figures variously famous and obscure, and carefully mapping the links between them, Painter’s narrative succeeds as an engaging and sophisticated intellectual history, as well as an eloquent reminder of the fluidity (and perhaps futility) of racial categories. --Brendan Driscoll --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (April 18, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393339742
• ISBN-13: 978-0393339741
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.3 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #278,007 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Nell Irvin Painter is the award-winning author of many books, including Sojourner Truth, Southern History Across the Color Line, Creating Black Americans, The History of White People, and Standing at Armageddon. She is currently the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University and lives in Newark, New Jersey.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

233 of 269 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Undoubtedly provocative and intense insight into the deeper meanings of race and identity March 16, 2010

By Todd Bartholomew TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

At first blush readers may be a bit off-put at a black woman writing a history of white people and the usual questions are likely to arise. But as a historian it is Nell Irvin Painter's job to transcend identities such as race and gender and to remain objective about her subject matter. There are many compelling arguments about the relative pros and cons of writing about a part of your identity or about an identity other than your own. Those arguments aside, Painter sets an ambitious goal of writing a history on the construct of the white race; the who, what, where, when, why and how of its origins, its evolution and change over time, and its greater societal significance and meaning to our present day and age. Rather than an angry diatribe against racism Painter seeks to provide a narrative of the evolution of white identity.

Painter begins in antiquity, a time in which race was not important so much as place; where you were from, a time of social hierarchy and class more so than racial consciousness. The disturbing truth is that class served more to define one's status and place than ethnicity or race for many centuries. Slavery, the great sin of any age, was racially colorblind in antiquity, and even in colonial America it was initially colorblind if indentured servitude is included. Painter guides readers through the evolution and construct of whiteness leading up to the harsh realities of the 19th Century, a time where whiteness took on further nuances, differences, and distinctions owing to increased immigration. It was a time when the Irish, Italians, Jews, and "others" were denigrated for their otherness; for not fitting the Anglo-Saxon ideal of whiteness.... These ideas and concepts linger in American consciousness and inform public policy and public opinion for nearly a century, resulting in some of the most egregious sins of the republic, including the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the exclusion of Asians from immigration, anti-Semitism and more. By the time of the Civil Rights Movement whites felt increasingly under attack, becoming the "other" in their own society. If Malcolm X and James Brown could exhort blacks to proclaim "Say it loud! I'm black and proud!" then why couldn't whites revel in their own racial pride? And here's where it gets interesting. Painter's argument is that a nation, founded by slaveholders with justification for its class system based upon the inherent inferiority of black people a foundational belief, must reach some form of reassessment of what it should be once slavery has ended. That process has hot yet fully occurred in the United States and until such a time remains unfinished business for us to move forward.

The end result is thought-provoking, certainly controversial, and more into the realm of history of ideas than most lay people will be comfortable with. Many will undoubtedly be offended by what Painter has to say, but her point is not to provide a hagiography of a race, but to examine the larger meanings of what race is, what it means, and how it shapes us as a people and a society. The results are meant to be unsettling and to initiate further thought, contemplation and introspection. To that end Painter succeeds wonderfully. This is meant to be a challenging and polarizing book and quite honestly those who make it through will be rewarded for it. Undoubtedly many will find points to contend and debate, but they will miss the larger argument. Read more ›

39 of 42 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good History of "Race" Theory January 8, 2011

By Xander

Format:Hardcover

Apparently, some who have read this book misunderstand what the author's aim was. The goal of the book was to document the historical foundations of the term "race" and Anglo-Saxon racial theory, which began in Europe and gained supporters across the Pond here in the United States. She also made very clear at the beginning that the term "race" began in the 1800s and that scholars now recognize that people are ethnicities, not races.

I was very impressed by her thorough research into the lives of the people who created the theory of race. Yes, she does make a point to highlight that the main actors were Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic Nordics. So what? Yes, she's a black woman and yes she has a leftist viewpoint. But she would be less than competent as a historian if she had not pointed this out.

My only objection is that sometimes she gets bogged down in too much minutiae on the lives of the scholars she's describing. On the other hand, she also delves into the personal and collegial relationships of these race theorists to each other and that's interesting.

Very good book and well worth reading.

130 of 165 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Perspective March 25, 2010

By S. Davis

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

It is very interesting to me that the fact that the author is Black gives readers pause or prompts a question as to "why" she is writing about white people. Haven't white people (educators or otherwise) been writing about people of color throughout our history. No one ever seems to question their ability to articulate their research or the validity of their perspective.

25 of 32 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Look for some surprises here. May 10, 2010

By George F. Simons

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

In current debates about immigration, not only in the USA but around the world, the dynamics of preference are rarely without an element of ethnic, racial or other cultural judgement in play. It is one of those areas of human interaction where perhaps, even knowing history well, we seem condemned to repeat it. In this masterful presentation, Nell Irvin Painter takes us through the history of the social construction we call "white people" or "whiteness." It is a frightening passage over stormy seas where the bark of human nature has yet to reach safe haven. Concepts of race may be long debunked from a scientific perspective, but their historical and continuing impact on human thinking and social structures is very real. Their story has rarely been examined so thoroughly from the perspective of dominant culture as it is in this volume.

A History of White People provides a coherent chronology of the creation, propagation and defense of "whiteness." At the same time it clears up common misconceptions about the targets of racism. For example, despite the fact that that the term "race" is likely to generate an image of the oppression of people of color resulting from the African slave trade and colonialism, this is in reality only one manifestation of racial patterning in a very long story of how difference has been identified and exploited. Whiteness is about superiority and belonging, the creation and defense of privilege, and above all, the shaping of an ideology that has penetrated social structures, politics, economics, colonialism and warfare.

While beginning her overview in classical times, Painter soon moves into the heart of the story, the development of the concepts of race and beauty in European thinking since the Renaissance.... She then lands squarely at home, focusing on the continuity of these ideas and their consequences in the US American story. In North American history, most slaves, indentured folk, "degenerates" and cannon fodder have been white people who were not yet white. They were betimes described as the guano or fertilizer for the new nation, which was to be owned, managed and enjoyed by those whose identity was variously described as English, Saxon, Nordic, etc. These are the tall, fair, strong, brave and beautiful men (and their women) chosen and destined by God to lead, dominate and civilize the continent, the "real" Americans. The rest, "failed representatives of failed races," deserved no lasting place in it.

Whiteness in the USA, as Painter points out underwent several expansions as acculturated immigrant populations such as the Germans and then the Irish (often charicatured with ape-like faces) succeeded in penetrating the social structure to the point of "becoming white." They were be followed in ensuing decades by newly whitewashed Slavs, Italians and Jews who had paid their dues as victims of racism before being allowed into the white club. Blacks and to a lesser degeee Native Americans and Asian Immigrants had no claim to citizenship for the greater part of US history, but served rather as the foil to the legitimation of those aforementioned groups who were becoming "white."

A good part of the book examines the development and propagation of racial superiority in science, philosophy, religion and popular thinking, everything from the collecting and measuring of skulls, employed overly long in nascent anthropology to determine racial superiority, to attempts to find genes and chromosomes to support differentition in the humanity by race and color. As the focus shifts to the continuation of the whiteness story in the USA, connections continue to be made to both British and continental figures in science and philosophy who shaped concepts of white superiority. Clifford Longley in Chosen People: The Big Idea that Shapes England and America documented well the sense of divine election which, no doubt, from the sermons of Cotton Mather to the radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin, strongly seconded the sense of God's confirmation of the "white man's burthen" as rooted in race.

Examining the scientific community, Painter documents the uphill struggle to move anthropology away from deterministic natural causes for human racial identity in order to validate a role for envrionment and nurture in the shaping of human diversity. But the struggle begun by Franz Boas is not over yet, as even today's newspaper describes how the scientific community is processing the newly discovered evidence that homo sapiens outside Africa shared genes with hairy homo neanderthalensis. Along with anthropologists, even today's interculturalists can be inclined to define and look for ethnic traits from an essentialist perspective.

At this point, I pause to note that the dynamics of race examined in this book are likely to cause shock and raise defensiveness. Some readers will be inclined to dismiss it as the work of a black researcher with an axe to grind. Nothing could be further from the truth. The History of White People contains no racial invective. but is a readable as well as scholarly presentation that credits important figures in European and US history with their legitimate accomplishments. At the same time it documents clearly where their thinking, research, writing, politics and actions produced, bolstered and enforced the kind of racial thinking and behavior that subsantially influenced their contemporaries and following generations.

It may be hard for some to learn that heroes and icons of US history such as Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sam Houston, Theorore Roosevelt, Henry Ford and countless others of power and influence clearly elaborated and supported attitudes and policies of racial superiority. Institutions of higher learning such as Harvard and Stanford were prime forces in the dessemination of scientific support for these attitudes. It would surprise many US Americans to know that the eugenic research and pricinples that drove Nazi genocide were to a great degree fabricated in the USA and even underwritten at times by the stateside economic barons before World War II. "Made in the USA" was, in fact cited as a defense by accused Nazis at Nuernburg.

Painter's is the sort of presentation that leads more to stunned silence than ringing applause. It is well written, well documented and well indexed. For intercultural professionals The History of White People raises questions about our basic assumptions and likely ethnocentricity as well as about the hegemony of our methodology. Do we perhaps still play an uncounscious role in the ongoing colonization still implicit in globalizing everything from education to management and commercial ventures? Humanity continues to wrestle with its racial understandings, and we who work at the interface of cultures need to concern ourselves with the balance between our own self esteem and the danger of adopting attitudes that demean others. Read more ›

22 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars How Race Began May 15, 2010

By John D. Cofield TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

The History of White People is an ironic title because, as Nell Irvin Painter ably demonstrates here, "whiteness" is a term subject to many interpretations through the centuries. Beginning with the Greeks and Romans and continuing to the present, Painter analyzes the attitudes held by master peoples towards those whom they subjugated, enslaved, or at least considered themselves to be dominant over in some form.

The book's best sections deal with the development of racial attitudes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Europeans, seeing themselves newly dominant over the rest of the world, attempted to find some biological rationale for their preeminence. Painter's descriptions of the bizarre "scientific" theories dealing with hair texture, skull sizes and shapes, height, and so on would be laughably absurd if those same theories had not led to the development of eugenics in the late nineteenth century. In turn eugenics in the twentieth century led to forceable sterilization of the "unfit" and other horrors, culminating in the Holocaust.

Painter writes well, with an occasional wry grimace and shake of the head. Her last chapter is one of the best, for here she gives a summary of the current state of "whiteness" in a world where DNA analysis and the mapping of the human genome have so muddied the waters that one wishes J.F. Blumenbach, William Z. Ripley, and other "scientists" who tried so hard to identify one race as superior to all others could be alive to see their work brought to naught.