The History of White People

“The History of White People,” by Nell Irvin PainterBook ReviewMarch 5, 2021By George FulmoreThis is a good book for anyone who wants to gain a better understanding of the history of “race” categorizations in the United States. It is quite a story.The author traces the concept of white as being beautiful, back to the slave trading of whites from Eastern Europe. He moves through to today, where modern biologists and geneticists do not believe that there are races at all, which means that all of the scholarly work once defined as fact was wrong. In between is where it gets messy, as the scars of prejudice that were justified in the past as real remains today.Ancient people did not think in terms of race, but as time went on, the concept of slavery became the foundation for the need to define race. Early thought went from a concept if white slavery to the justification of Black slavery. A parallel development would be the concept of beauty, primarily, being involved intrinsically with the lightness or darkness of one’s skin. Of course native intelligence could also be directly involved with race, as well, said the scholars in the 1800s.The book talks a lot about the history of shapes and sizes of skulls being involved with theories of intelligence and race. By 1800, there was a great deal of discussion in both the U.S. and Europe about the variances between humans. Many of the theories, not surprisingly, based their categorizations on skin color, but theories of how skull shapes and sizes remained popular, as well.What seems somewhat comical to us, today, were the early struggles to define categories of whites. When Irish immigrants began to pour into the U.S. in the early 1800s, they were considered a different race than the Anglo-Saxon English. By the mid-1800s, most scholars believed that one’s heritage, or race, predetermined everything, including intelligence. Such racial hierarchies “set the poor and powerless at the bottom and the rich and powerful at the top.” And, more and more, as more and more “races” would integrate into being “white,” racial theories continued to justify the continuation of the slavery of Blacks.Along with the theories of white racial superiority were the warnings that any mixture of the races was bad. The “superior” race was commonly referred as to the “English race.” Later, this would evolve into the “English-speaking” people.William J. Ripley, who was seen as a prominent American economist and scholar, is featured in much of the book. His book, “Races of Europe,” is published in 1899. He comes up with three basic European races: Teutonic, Alpine, and Mediterranean. For each, he has detailed descriptions for heads, faces, hair, noses and eyes, but the basis for the three was primarily the differences in the heads. But, per the author of this book being reviewed, much in the Ripley book of more than 600 pages contradicts itself. Despite this, the book sold well and was very popular with the general public.Initially, Ripley did not know what to do with Jews, Slavs, Turks or other Eastern Europeans, so he excluded them. By 1908, Ripley was backtracking on many of his theories, saying that there might only be one white race. But to him, such a race had become much superior to any other group or race, meaning that it was clearly superior to any people of color.By this time, the U.S. had become a race-obsessed nation. And, Ripley, despite his many contradictions, was considered the top U.S. scholar to define the rules for all this.A counter argument to Ripley’s work came from the German scholar Franz Boas, who began to equate the differences in people based more on the differences in culture and environment. This type of thinking played into the Progressive Era, which promoted the concept of improvements, via better living standards, education and such. Having said this, the concepts of immigration and assimilation were very much in competition with the theories of different races, as the U.S. headed in the 1920s, following World War I.What to do with poor whites when discussing all this was a challenge. A popular theory was that many of these folks were embedded with “degenerate” characteristics, which were simply carried on by their offspring. There were even serious efforts to sterilize such people, to prevent them from duplicating themselves. Per this book being reviewed, “By 1968, some 65,000 Americans had been sterilized against their will, with California far in the lead, with Virginia a distant second.”Intelligence testing became a popular way to begin to sort out the intelligence of various groups. Extensive testing of those in the military during WW1 was shown to prove that those of English background were far superior to those from Italy or Poland or such. But then there was talk that those with inferior intelligence improved the longer that they lived in the U.S.By the 1040s, the general feeling was that there were three races: Mongoloid, Caucasian and Negroid. Native Americans did not fit into any of this, nor did Latinos. Of interest is that Latinos were allowed to fight in segregated white units in World War II.By the end of the war, Italians and Irish and others were becoming more and more integrated within the definition of white, while Jews and Blacks and others were tending to be living in segregated housing areas, especially in the large cities. Complicit in this was the Catholic Church, which was happy to supply churches specific to a single ethnic group, as opposed to any promotion of mixing various ethnicities together.Native Americans and Asians were excluded from white-only housing areas and from new housing developments being built after WWII.In 1940, 77 percent of Blacks lived in The South. As time went on, segregation of groups in the North began to be more and more of an economic thing, but, of course, the rules for economic opportunity were rigged in favor of whites.Jumping ahead, per the book, “three out of four marriages had already crossed ethnic boundaries by 1980.” And, by then, science let it known that there was no reality to the concept of race. All humans, it was shown, shared more than 99% of the same basic characteristics. Still, the concept of various races and intelligence levels persisted, almost as if the concepts in the book, “Races of Europe” were still very much in effect, despite it having been written nearly 100 years before.This 2010 book being reviewed ends by asking “Where are we now?” The answer: “The fundamental Black/White binary endures,” says the author, and “poverty in a black skin endures, as the opposite of whiteness.”In summary for this review, this book provides a great deal of detailed information on the people and their academic works that have formed the basis to our modern misunderstandings of the definitions and concepts of race. Such are hard to change, especially with self-interest and status quo being involved. Such is human nature.

This is a fascinating book, scholarly and erudite, well researched and well documented by a respected historian. I was expecting something a great deal more angry and focused on white oppression of African Americans. That is apparently what a number of reviewers saw, so I was pleasantly surprised as well as instructed. I always wondered why white people are called `Caucasian'. Anyone who has had a few history courses will have known something about the craniometry craze in the late nineteenth century, but Dr. Painter draws it all together by showing who the influential scientists were and how they became spread the idea of seeing everything in racial terms through an imagined glorious, pure Saxon past. It was startling to see how deeply Ralph Waldo Emerson was involved. A description of the stunning amount of scholarship devoted to dividing up Europeans into races and ranking them according to `Saxon' cultural ideals of beauty while largely ignoring the rest of humanity occupies the first twenty-six chapters; relations with blacks do not come up until the last two short chapters (of 28). Measuring skulls and blathering on and on about some imagined Saxon golden age now seems daft and laughable, but it should be a continuing lesson to science. Many of these people saw that their data had problems but ignored the contradictions, and ignored even common sense. When they were taken up by the Nazi party and implemented into government policy, they were a contributing factor to the holocaust the Germans visited on Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, anyone perceived to be deficient breeding stock.I was in university before black studies and had not even heard of white studies until I read this book. The idea of whiteness being continually redefined and expanded due to the exigencies of immigration to the New World was entirely new to me. Dr. Painter presents the concept of four great expansions of whiteness: 1) in the 1840's when the property-owning requirement for voting was abandoned, paving the way for the rise of the `Jacksonian common man', 2) in the 1890's when previous waves of Irish and German immigrants were accepted as white so they could join us in discriminating against new waves of Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Slavs, pretty much everybody from southern and eastern Europe, 3) in the 1940's during World War II when Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were accepted as white, and even other Catholics, and 4) in the 1960's when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally forced the inclusion of blacks and Asians in the definition of `American' and thus in a strange way as `white'. It's a bit of a saving grace that the great harms done in this whole deluded effort to define whiteness led to continual expansions of the definition of what it means to be a citizen of America.Franz Boas, with his students Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, are presented as modernist heroes in this book. They constructed an alternative theory of human nature, the `blank slate', the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be molded into any shape, to battle the pervasive racial theories of the day. They were somewhat too successful in convincing academia and the lay public into abandoning nature as the explainer of all and substituting nurture in its place. Many of their well-meaning ideas have been shown to have no basis but continue to hinder our ability to address societal problems such as violence.

Everything about this book is true. Co-workers were mad about me reading about their history. The wrote me up.🤣🤣

I felt that this book should be rewritten under the title ‘A History Of White Things Of Interest To Nell Irvin Painter’. There’s material about slavery from before it was practiced exclusively on Africans, also about white ideas of beauty, famous white racists and the Scythians(?!).There is a strong inertia present from the writer towards her subject matter. Her distaste prevents her from getting to grips with the material, it seems to me. I would have written, for example, about how Romans and Byzantines felt about Germans and Danes, I would have written about Hernan Cortes meeting Moctezuma & the Aztecs, I’d have written about Vasco Da Gama sailing around Africa and about the Knights Templars and the Sack of Rome by Alaric’s Goths.That’s a History Of White People, right there, and I would have chapters on slavery, colonialism and the Holocaust too. Of course I would, why do you think I’d do anything else. It would be racist to ignore the racism. I tell the truth about just what white people are.My hypothesis being, that to understand white people, you should consider them as the direct ancestors of the tribes that sacked Rome. Which is what they are. Christianized, enlightened and now digitised, I’d give you straight-up Palefaces with no apology.I did think the book needs proper editing too, excuse me for saying so.

Very happy with purchase and condition.

Another brilliant read. Very informative.

I'm not that happy with this book. The idea is interesting, but the way it is written doesn't convince me.First of all, it is actually not a history of white people, as the author herself admits. The focus is actually white slavery vs black slavery, as a fact of historical societies and as an idea inside the society of white people.This is an intriguing concept and there are certainly interesting facts to discover. But the stile how it is delivered is - in my opinion - old-fashioned, boring and discouraging.Old-fashioned is for me to start somewhere with the greek and roman accounts about Caucasians, Celtic and Germanic tribes without structuring the whole thing and making clear, what story this is going to tell.Sometimes in between, we have some idea of whiteness or white supremacy. Then it's again about slavery.Then we travel further through the centuries and learn this or that, but the guiding principles and concepts only show up from time to time and do not rule the setup of the presentation.Sorry, but I didn't have the patience to follow this path. For modern historiography I have definitely other expectations.

Well written. Interesting read on how racism started by a few people with very strange ideas of white people’s superiority, none of which make sense. However, people were so willing to believe what these so-called experts had to say, it has led to centuries of whites feeling superior to other people. Everyone should read this book and realize racism is man-made with no science to back it up.