I plan to use a lot of quotation marks in this review, because when discussing "race" nothing is well defined or clear.    The American Heritage Dictionary defines "race" as "a group of persons related by common descent or heredity" - not really that complicated or controversial.   The problem comes when one tries to distinguish between different races.   Human history is so replete with genetic blending that it becomes impossible to distinguish where one group starts and another begins.  The definition becomes quite useless.   This may all seem rather trivial to the enlightened 21st century reader, but a couple hundred years ago - when scientists were first trying to explain the complexities of humanity - the concepts of "racial purity" and "racial hierarchy" were part of the fabric of society, impacting the lives of everyone.  In The History of White People, author Nell Irvin Painter tackles one segment of the "race" story, revealing the origins of the "white race" - a concept that I never imagined could be quite so complicated.

Starting from the earliest interactions with future "white people", Painter describes Julius Caesar's adventures with the Gauls of northwestern Europe, the Celts of the British Isles and the Scythians to the northeast.   While there was plenty of slanderous bigotry in Roman times, there weren't any "white people" yet.   Painter then travels quickly through the tumultuous Dark Ages, pointing out that the vast majority of present day "white" people have slavery in their ancestry.   It wasn't until relatively recently that slaves were collected from distant continents; most slavery through time was transacted much closer to home.  

Following this introduction, the author then delves into the meat of the book, exploring the birth of "race science".   The convoluted origins of the words like "white", "Caucasian", "Teutonic" and "Anglo-Saxon" are revealed in fascinating detail.   While modern Americans may think that "white" is a race in contrast to "black" or "Asian", the earliest writers were much more concerned about a smaller, strictly European stage, focusing on other "non-white" races like "Alpine", "Mediterranean", "Irish", "Lapp", "French", "Jewish", "Italian", "Greek", "Pole", "Slav", and so on.   People with origins based on other continents didn't even enter the picture.    Painter's descriptions of the contortions that many writers would go through to establish that they were a member of the  "pure", truly "white'" race are rather comical at times, at one point one writer seriously proposed that even Jesus was of "Anglo-Saxon" stock. 

Over 400 pages, Painter - a professor of history at Princeton University - takes the reader through a complicated review of much of European and American history, but from a viewpoint that I hadn't encountered before.   She writes in a concise, heavily footnoted style that is really quite readable, given the large amount of information she provides.   The book reminded me of Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States", not for any political reasons, but because it covers history from a perspective not usually presented in traditional history books.   Painter writes from a modern viewpoint - often making allusions to the present day - and I detect no political agenda or bias.

Over this wide-ranging work, Painter reflects on the racial opinions of many early scientists and philosophers, including American luminaries such as Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson.   She even throws in Malcolm X at the end.  Despite the blatantly racist views of many of these individuals, Painter does an exceptional job of viewing their opinions in context, demonizing no one.  She also discusses the early 20th century American eugenics movement, "intelligence" testing and some of the early efforts to understand "race" at a genetic level, which laid much of the ground work for later Nazi atrocities.   The views of an American eugenicist named Charles Davenport represented a rather bizarre take on human genetics.

"Davenport and most American eugenicists rejected complexity, preferring to believe that human inheritance acted in a simple on-off fashion, like the height, color and wrinkling of Gregor Mendel's sweet peas.  Intelligence could then be mapped and numbered along a single yardstick, allowing Davenport to speak of intelligence as a ‘unit character' or ‘unit trait'.   In today's parlance, he saw intelligence as a single heritable gene.  It followed that unit characters decreed an individual to be either normal or feebleminded.  Unit traits - genes, if you will - also determined shiftlessness, nomadism, or ‘thalassophilia' (love of the sea), all hereditary."

Bringing the story into the present day, including the election of the first "black" US president, she reflects on the struggles of the US Census Bureau and their inevitably futile efforts to categorize the American populace according to "race" and the more modern sounding "ethnicity".    Overall, The History of White People is an inspired and thoroughly entertaining book about a fascinating, potentially explosive topic handled with skill, originality and sensitivity.   A strong recommendation from this "white" mongrel. 

Recommended: Yes