On the History of American Whiteness

In her new book, The History of White People, Nell Painter offers a detailed survey of racial whiteness as a political rather than biological category. She shows that the category of "white people" has been comprised of ever-changing, politically determined groupings of disparate peoples, based on shifting criteria and distinguished from supposed nonwhite "races" of people.

As Painter herself notes, her book might more accurately be titled "Constructions of White Americans from Antiquity to the Present"; or, as Edmund Morgan and Marie Morgan suggested recently in The New York Review of Books, it might "have been called The Making of White America, for it is devoted to the white Americans who started the United States in 1776 and experienced successive 'enlargements' of white immigrants." ¹ It is not a global history of "white people." Moreover, Painter's book comes after some twenty years of critical white studies, which built upon earlier critical analyses of American whiteness by black and Native American writers like David Walker, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sarah Winnemucca, and James Baldwin. Therefore, The History of White People is not groundbreaking in the manner of, say, Du Bois' Black Reconstruction (1935) or David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness (1991). What Painter provides, however, is considerable: a thorough, highly readable, and—aside from how it skips over the colonial period—comprehensive study of American whiteness, with a wealth of telling stories and details. She ranges over such topics as European ideas about the ancient lineage of the peoples that we have come to call white people; white slavery; the Eurocentric racial aesthetics and science of "white beauty"; how the term "Caucasian" came to be a scientific designation for "white people"; the influence of nineteenth-century German racial thought on U.S. racial thought; the Anglo-Saxonist racist ideas of the great American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson; nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas about distinct and unequal white races; and, centrally, the gradually expanding category of peoples who are considered to be full-fledged "white" Americans.

Two central themes in the first half of the book are the lineage and myths in Western antiquity that precede the emergence of modern ideas about a "white race" of people and the long history of what Painter calls, somewhat misleadingly, the "white slavery" of the middle ages, where "geography, not race, ruled" (p. 38). Her analysis corrects stubborn notions that the racial "categories we use today [can] be read backwards over the millennia" (p. 1). Consideration of the varied ancestries of the peoples we have learned to call "white," or members of "the white race," illuminates basic confusions inherent in the very idea. Discussing ancient Greeks and Scythians, and then Romans, Celts, Gauls, and Germani, Painter writes, "Were there 'white' people in antiquity? . . . People with light skin certainly existed well before our own times. But did anyone think that they were 'white' or that their character related to their color? No, for neither the idea of race nor the idea of 'white' people had been invented, and people's skin color did not carry useful meaning" (p. 1). It was not inevitable that the descendents of these various peoples eventually would be classified together in modern racial thought and politics as members of a "white race" or of several "white races"; and the meaning of "light-colored skin"—and even of what counted as "light-colored" or "white" skin—shifted starkly over time.

Likewise, Painter surveys the now largely forgotten history of unfree, enslaved "white people"—from Georgian and Circassian slaves in the Middle Ages to English indentured servants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—to disrupt the "notion of freedom [that] lies at the core of the American idea of whiteness" (p. 38). As its counterpoint, she explains, the idea of slavery "calls up racial difference, carving a permanent chasm of race between the free and the enslaved" (p. 38). This chasm looks more artificial, more contingent, however, once we realize...