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I got a book for Christmas called The History of White People. The author, Nell Irvin Painter, is Emerita Professor of History at Princeton University. She sets out to show in this book that the concept of ‘one white race’ is a recent historical invention.
Powerful people and institutions wrote history, anthropology, and science in such a way as to uphold their power based on the myth of a pure Anglo-Saxon race. Even my heroes Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson had a hand in this devious scheme. Emerson looms large as an influence in this mythic white race movement.
Professor Painter starts her history of white people by looking at ancient Greek and Roman history when the concept of ‘race’ did not exist. Not until the 18th century did an obsession with ‘whiteness’ become important. The German invention of the idea of Caucasian beauty came out of the business of buying and selling ‘white’ slaves from the Caucasus region (the land separating the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea). Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s doctoral dissertation (On the Natural variety of Mankind, 1775) and his subsequent studies introduced in scientific language the notion of a beautiful, white Caucasian race.
Intellectuals like Madame de Stael and Thomas Carlyle spread a theory of the superiority of the ‘white race.’ Left out of this Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ were the Irish and Native Americans, and later the Italians, Jews, Slavs, and Chinese. Immigrants in America were categorized according to their lack of racial purity.
The measurement of skulls, the eugenics movement, and biased intelligence tests were used to differentiate Anglo-Saxons from other ‘races.’
This is a history of how the powerful not only write history, but establish scientific theories and invent cultural stereotypes. There is no such thing as a Caucasian race; nor is there a ‘white race.’ Skin color is a by-product of two kinds of melanin: red to yellow (pheomelanin) and dark brown to black (eumelanin). How much of which sort of melanin people have in their skin—and to what degree it is expressed—depends entirely over time on exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Painter writes:
Our species originated in Africa some 1.2 million years ago, evolving from primates like chimpanzees. Chimpanzees, like most other animals, have light skin under dark hair. Shedding that thick coat of hair, humans quickly developed dark skin, and they stayed dark until leaving Africa for cloudier territory about 100,000 years ago, when residence in dark, wintry regions like northern Europe and northern Asia required another color change, this time from dark to light. Light-skinned Europeans and light-skinned Asians lost pigmentation through different genetic processes in Europe and Asia. (p. 395)
The History of White People covers a vast amount of history and science. And it deals with controversial matters. My own bias tends to accept the conclusions of this study. It certainly educated me concerning historical figures and movements that have influenced how we think and how we relate to other people.
It’s interesting that St. Paul tells the people of Athens that “we all come from one blood” (Acts 17). Now we know that our first parents were dark-skinned Africans. (When have you seen the mythical Adam and Eve portrayed as black Africans?) Would it be correct to say that we all started out black, and that some of us have lost our blackness and had to settle for whiteness?
SO WHAT?
So much of the injustice in the world is caused by racism and fear of the Other—that is, those who are different than us. The solution to these causal factors has to do with being more educated about scientific facts surrounding questions of ‘race’; working toward more equality in terms of economics and social position; and simply getting to know people who are different from us on a personal basis. The ‘mixing’ of the ‘races’ is an important element in finding out that we are all essentially the same.
Whoever does the defining does the confining.
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