By LINDA GORDON
Nell Irvin Painter’s title, “The History of White People,” is a
provocation in several ways: it’s monumental in sweep, and its
absurd
grandiosity should call to mind the fact that writing a “History
of Black
People” might seem perfectly reasonable to white people. But the
title is
literally accurate, because the book traces characterizations of
the
lighter-skinned people we call white today, starting with the
ancient
Scythians. For those who have not yet registered how much these
characterizations have changed, let me assure you that sensory
observation
was not the basis of racial nomenclature.
Robin Holland
Nell Irvin Painter
Some ancient descriptions did note color, as when the ancient
Greeks
recognized that their “barbaric” northern neighbors, Scythians and
Celts,
had lighter skin than Greeks considered normal. Most ancient
peoples
defined population differences culturally, not physically, and
often
regarded lighter people as less civilized. Centuries later,
European
travel writers regarded the light-skinned Circassians, a k a
Caucasians,
as people best fit only for slavery, yet at the same time labeled
Circassian slave women the epitome of beauty. Exoticizing and
sexualizing
women of allegedly inferior “races” has a long and continuous
history in
racial thought; it’s just that today they are usually
darker-skinned
women.
“Whiteness studies” have so proliferated in the last two
decades that
historians might be forgiven a yawn in response to being told that
racial
divisions are fundamentally arbitrary, and that deciding who is
white has
been not only fluid but also heavily influenced by class and
culture. In
some Latin American countries, for example, the term blanquearse,
to bleach oneself, is used to
mean moving upward in class status. But this concept — the social
and
cultural construction of race over time — remains harder for many
people
to understand than, say, the notion that gender is a social and
cultural
construction, unlike sex. As recently as 10 years ago, some of my
undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin
heard my explanations of
critical race theory as a denial of observable physical
differences.
I wish I had had this book to offer them. Painter, a renowned
historian
recently retired from Princeton, has written an unusual study: an
intellectual history, with occasional excursions to examine
vernacular
usage, for popular audiences. It has much to teach everyone,
including
whiteness experts, but it is accessible and breezy, its coverage
broad and
therefore necessarily superficial.
The modern intellectual history of whiteness began among the
18th-century German scholars who invented racial “science.” Johann
Joachim
Winckelmann made the ancient Greeks his models of beauty by
imagining them
white-skinned; he may even have suppressed his own (correct)
suspicion
that their statues, though copied by the Romans in white marble,
had
originally been painted. The Dutchman Petrus Camper calculated the
proportions and angles of the ideal face and skull, and produced a
scale
that awarded a perfect rating to the head of a Greek god and
ranked
Europeans as the runners-up, earning 80 out of 100. The Englishman
Charles
White collected skulls that he arranged from lowest to highest
degree of
perfection. He did not think he was seeing the gradual improvement
of the
human species, but assumed rather the polygenesis theory: the
different
races arose from separate divine creations and were designed with
a
range of quality.
The modern concept of a Caucasian race, which students my age
were
taught in school, came from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of
Göttingen, the
most influential of this generation of race scholars. Switching
from
skulls to skin, he divided humans into five races by color —
white,
yellow, copper, tawny, and tawny-black to jet-black — but he
ascribed
these differences to climate. Still convinced that people of the
Caucasus
were the paragons of beauty, he placed residents of North Africa
and India
in the Caucasian category, sliding into a linguistic analysis
based on the
common derivation of Indo-European languages. That category,
Painter
notes, soon slipped free of any geographic or linguistic moorings
and
became a quasi-scientific term for a race known as “white.”
Some great American heroes, notably Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson,
absorbed Blumenbach’s
influence but relabeled the categories of white superiority. They
adopted
the Saxons as their ideal, imagining Americans as direct and
unalloyed
descendants of the English, later including the Germans. In
general,
Western labels for racial superiority moved thus: Caucasian →
Saxon →
Teutonic → Nordic → Aryan → white/Anglo.
The spread of evolutionary theory required a series of
theoretical
shifts, to cope with changing understandings of what is heritable.
When
hereditary thought produced eugenics, the effort to breed superior
human
beings, it relied mostly on inaccurate genetics. Nevertheless,
eugenic
“science” became authoritative from the late 19th century through
the
1930s. Eugenics gave rise to laws in at least 30 states
authorizing forced
sterilization of the ostensibly feeble-minded and the hereditarily
criminal. Painter cites an estimate of 65,000 sterilized against
their
will by 1968, after which a combined feminist and civil rights
campaign
succeeded in radically restricting forced sterilization. While
blacks and
American Indians were disproportionately victimized, intelligence
testing
added many immigrants and others of “inferior stock,”
predominantly
Appalachian whites, to the rolls of the surgically sterilized.
In the long run, the project of measuring “intelligence”
probably did
more than eugenics to stigmatize and hold back the nonwhite.
Researchers
gave I.Q. tests to 1,750,000 recruits in World War I and found
that the
average mental age, for those 18 and over, was 13.08 years. That
experiment in mass testing failed owing to the Army’s insistence
that even
the lowest ranked usually became model soldiers. But I.Q. testing
achieved
success in driving the anti-immigration movement. The tests
allowed
calibrated rankings of Americans of different ancestries — the
English at
the top, Poles on the bottom. Returning to head measurements,
other
researchers computed with new categories the proportion of
different
“blood” in people of different races: Belgians were 60 percent
Nordic (the
superior European race) and 40 percent Alpine, while the Irish
were 30
percent Nordic and 70 percent Mediterranean (the inferior European
race).
Sometimes politics produced immediate changes in these supposedly
objective findings: World War I caused the downgrading of Germans
from
heavily Nordic to heavily Alpine.
Painter points out, but without adequate discussion, that the
adoration
of whiteness became particularly problematic for women, as pale
blue-eyed
blondes became, like so many unattainable desires, a reminder of
what was
second-class about the rest of us. Among the painfully comic
absurdities
that racial science produced was the “beauty map” constructed by
Francis
Galton around the turn of the 20th century: he classified people
as good,
medium or bad; he categorized those he saw by using pushpins and
thus
demonstrated that London ranked highest and Aberdeen lowest in
average
beauty.
Rankings of intelligence and beauty supported escalating
anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism in early-20th-century America.
Both prejudices racialized non-Protestant groups. But Painter
misses
some crucial regional differences. While Jews and Italians were
nonwhite
in the East, they had long been white in San Francisco, where the
racial
“inferiors” were the Chinese. Although the United States census
categorized Mexican-Americans as white through 1930, census
enumerators in the Southwest, working from a different racial
understanding, ignored those instructions and marked them “M” for
Mexican.
In the same period, anarchist or socialist beliefs became a
sign of
racial inferiority, a premise strengthened by the presence of many
immigrants and Jews among early-20th-century radicals. Whiteness
thus
became a method of stigmatizing dissenting ideas, a marker of
ideological
respectability; Painter should have investigated this phenomenon
further.
Also missing from the book is an analysis of the all-important
question:
Who benefits and how from the imprimatur of whiteness? Political
elites
and employers of low-wage labor, to choose just two groups,
actively
policed the boundaries of whiteness.
But I cannot fault Nell Painter’s choices — omissions to keep a
book
widely readable. Often, scholarly interpretation is transmitted
through
textbooks that oversimplify and even bore their readers with vague
generalities. Far better for a large audience to learn about
whiteness
from a distinguished scholar in an insightful and lively
exposition.
Linda Gordon is a professor of history at New York University
and the
author, most recently, of “Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond
Limits
ACESSE: http://www.nellpainter.com/
Colaborador desta postagem: J. J. Reis
