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On the History of American Whiteness

Nell Irvin Painter. The History of White People. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010. xii + 496 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $27.95 (cloth); $17.95 (paper). In her new book, The History of White People, Nell Painter offers a detailed survey of racial whiteness as a political rather than biological category. She shows that the category of "white people" has been comprised of ever-changing, politi- cally determined groupings of disparate peoples, based on shifting criteria and distinguished from supposed nonwhite "races" of people. As Painter herself notes, her book might more accurately be titled "Con- structions of White Americans from Antiquity to the Present"; or, as Edmund Morgan and Marie Morgan suggested recently in The New York Review of Books, it might "have been called The Making of White America, for it is devoted to the white Americans who started the United States in 1776 and experienced successive 'enlargements' of white immigrants." 1 It is not a global history of "white people." Moreover, Painter's book comes after some twenty years of critical white studies, which built upon earlier critical analyses of American whiteness by black and Native American writers like David Walker, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sarah Winnemucca, and James Baldwin. Therefore, The History of White People is not groundbreaking in the manner of, say, Du Bois' Black Reconstruction (1935) or David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness (1991). What Painter provides, however, is considerable: a thorough, highly readable, and— aside from how it skips over the colonial period—comprehensive study of American whiteness, with a wealth of telling stories and details. She ranges over such topics as European ideas about the ancient lineage of the peoples that we have come to call white people; white slavery; the Eurocentric racial aesthetics and science of "white beauty"; how the term "Caucasian" came to be a scientific designation for "white people"; the influence of nineteenth- century German racial thought on U.S. racial thought; the Anglo-Saxonist racist ideas of the great American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson; nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas about distinct and unequal white races; and, centrally, the gradually expanding category of peoples who are considered to be full- fledged "white" Americans.