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.

The history of fragile white men stroking each other's egos with pseudoscience, insisting too much. The book is drily informative with interspersals of bemusingly casual commentary, ironic speech, and belaboured listings of abuse-as-scholarship. The last chapter jumps sixty years, promotes exceptionalism, and asks naive questions for the white gaze.

What a read. Painter's work about the concept of whiteness as both historical canard and force is just fascinating. It's also hard to read in the sense that it's constantly hitting you with anachronistic arguements for “race science”–it takes a toll. It's just so tiring to experience the same story of contemporary racism play out over and over again. It took me over a year to finish but it's worth it. The origins of even contemporary attitudes towards whiteness are appallingly arbitrary and owe a large burden to the previous “successes” of craniometry.

Painter's patient prose depicts a history of controlling and expanding “whiteness” that's appalling and yet understandable for how effective it was even among the elites. In fact, it's the scientists and men of power that frequently star in the Yakety Sax pursuit of weaponized whiteness.

My only suggestion is that the title of this book could more appropriately termed “The Invention of Whiteness.”

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.

The title's a bit misleading, as this is more a history of perceptions of race and whiteness than a literal history of white people. From the ancient white slave trade around the Balkans during the classical period, to the Visigoths/Gauls/Rome's general misperceptions of anyone north/northwest, to British imperialism and American racism, this is a broad, fun, informative book. It's also, apparently, really polarizing (the Amazon ratings are an inverted U) - I'm not sure exactly why, since I didn't find anything terribly provocative there, but I suppose people who study race/racism may feel differently. I found the most interesting chapters to be those entitled “The Enlargement of American Whiteness” - examining immigration and assimilation and eugenics in 19th century America. Some crazy stuff. Overall, an engaging primer on a fascinating/weird topic.