'History of White People' by Nell Irvin Painter, PhD

Dr. Painter does a superb job of highlighting how pseudo-science and outright fallacy, propagated over millennia, are crucial ingredients in constructing the myth of white superiority, and even to define what is “whiteness” in the first place.  What I find troubling about this particular undertaking is a) the amount of effort that she invests in repeatedly uncovering inconsistencies and faulty logic deployed throughout the ages to tout the splendor, virtue and supremacy of what we contemporaneously come to understand as whiteness and white people, without ever really b) delving into the atrocities committed against humanity in order to protect/support this myth, almost c) creating the impression that the promulgation of “whiteness” is a fanciful conceit not drenched in blood and injustice and abomination.

I can appreciate that as an historian and scholar Dr. Painter is committed to precision in language and to properly defining/identifying a subject, in this case: whiteness, or more correctly, The History of White People.  I imagine her gleefully pouncing on every single idiocy and incredulity in what had previously been presented as bulletproof fact with respect to the greatness and constancy of whiteness.  I get it:  if one is going to do a job, one should do it to the best of one’s ability, and in her case, she is an expert historian, so she cannot let any flawed argument escape her scrutiny.  About midway through the book, Painter debunks what felt like the thousandth inconsistency in yet another Saxo-file’s logic, this time antebellum Alabaman Josiah Nott, M.D. purporting that miscegenation between Blacks and whites would create a neutered hybrid (p. 198).  This assertion occurs in an article published in 1843 amid a panoply of extant examples of living, breathing, mating offspring of Black/white interbreeding.  Time and again she shows the preposterousness of glorifying whiteness. But it starts to feel redundant.  Even the generic lay-reader had some idea that white supremacy was malarkey when we were taught about Adolf Hitler’s obsession with blonde hair and blue eyes though Hitler himself was every inch the brown-eyed brunette. 

What Painter does supremely is draw the reader’s attention to a centuries’ old successful marketing campaign celebrating the superiority of whiteness, though this tradition be substantiated by, at best, hype and hoax.  Perhaps a more accurate description of what these so-called intellectual giants were doing (Jefferson, Carlyle, Emerson, Morton, Nott, et. al.) was merely inventing the mythologized backstory of an otherwise inglorious and/or unknown past to justify and sanitize ‘greatness’ predicated by terrorism, barbarousness and greed.  Many a rogue political regime has carried out the same propaganda campaign throughout history.

 I wish she would have directed her incisive gaze toward all of the damage that has been done in the name of protecting and promulgating the sanctity of whiteness.  For example, it was incredibly helpful to learn that within just three decades of the last century (1934-64) the federal government spent $14BB to educate roughly 7.7MM veterans (very few were Black or any other color given the pervasive racism against Blacks and people of color during this time period) via the GI Bill and another $120BB to support home ownership through FHA lending which explicitly barred Blacks (p. 366).  I thought there maybe would be some mention of how Emmett Till was mutilated in order to protect the virtue of white womanhood or that Black Wall Street was set ablaze and completely razed to uphold white honor.  While I thoroughly enjoyed The History of White People, I would have found more useful and compelling The History of How White People Used Trickery, Chicanery and Other Vicious Tactics to Elevate Themselves at the Expense of Others.