A review of The History of White People
In Review
The History of White People
Have you ever wondered why there are so many terms for white people? Caucasian is often the designation on the census form. Anglo-Saxon has been attached to white and Protestant to give us the acronym WASP. Nazis and skinheads refer to whites as Aryans. Have you ever been curious about how certain groups, such as Irish, Jewish and Italian immigrants, have been accepted into the race of white Americans over time? Nell Irvin Painter's The History of White People is an amazing work by one of the nation's finest historians. Weaving her way along from the ancient Greeks to the human genome project, Painter shows how whiteness has been a confusing racial category and how intellectuals have painstakingly defined an imaginary white race (or races).
Painter finds that in the time of the Greeks and Romans, skin color had little useful meaning. Europeans were not the world's dominant power, and many Europeans were enslaved. They were laborers who could be bought and bartered, raped and ripped off. (Britain's most famous slave was Succat, better known as Patrick, who became the patron saint of Ireland.) It is within this history of white slavery that Painter finds the first claims of the supremacy of whiteness—in the sex trade. Enslaved eastern European women became symbols of beauty. By 1864, America's own P. T. Barnum asked his European agent to locate a "beautiful Circassian girl" to exhibit "the purest example of the white race." The profound irony of the emergence of whiteness is that it was packaged in the beauty of a slave.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, a host of intellectuals, novelists and artists gave the names Caucasian and Anglo-Saxon to whites. European scholars such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach identified Caucasian people as white and beautiful. Caucasia is a mountainous area just north of Turkey. For some of these race scientists, Caucasia extended into northern Africa and India. But all of them agreed that the Caucasians were at the top of the human pyramid.
