The history of White people
By: Nell Irvin Painter.
Publisher: W.W. Norton
Published: 2010
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 496
ISBN-13: 9780393049343
Subjects: Whites -- Race identity -- United States; Whites -- United States -- History; United States -- Race relations
Description: Historian Painter centers her momentous study of racial classification on the slave trade and the nation-building efforts which dominated the United States in the 18th century, when thinkers led by Ralph Waldo Emerson strove to explain the rapid progress of America within the context of white superiority. Her research is filled with frequent, startling realizations about how tenuous and temporary our racial classifications really are.

"Ever since the Enlightenment, race theory and its inevitable partner, racism, have followed a crooked road, constructed by dominant peoples to justify their domination of others. Filling a huge gap in historical literature that long focused on the non-white, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, tracing not only the invention of the idea of race but also the frequent worship of 'whiteness' for economic, social, scientific, and political ends. Our story begins in Greek and Roman antiquity, where the concept of race did not exist, only geography and the opportunity to conquer and enslave others. Not until the eighteenth century did an obsession with whiteness flourish, with the German invention of the notion of Caucasian beauty. This theory made northern Europeans into 'Saxons, ' 'Anglo-Saxons, ' and 'Teutons, ' envisioned as uniquely handsome natural rulers.^

Here was a worldview congenial to northern Europeans bent on empire. There followed an explosion of theories of race, now focusing on racial temperament as well as skin color. Spread by such intellectuals as Madame de Stael and Thomas Carlyle, white race theory soon reached North America with a vengeance. Its chief spokesman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, did the most to label Anglo-Saxons -- icons of beauty and virtue -- as the only true Americans. It was an ideal that excluded not only blacks but also all ethnic groups not of Protestant, northern European background. The Irish and Native Americans were out and, later, so were the Chinese, Jews, Italians, Slavs, and Greeks -- all deemed racially alien. Did immigrations threaten the very existence of America? Americans were assumed to be white, but who among poor immigrants could become truly American? A tortured and convoluted series of scientific explorations developed --^

theories intended to keep Anglo-Saxons at the top: the ever-popular measurement of skulls, the powerful eugenics movement, and highly biased intelligence tests -- all designed to keep working people out and down."--Publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: Greeks and scythians; title: Romans, Celts, Gauls, and Germani; title: White slavery; title: White slavery as beauty ideal; title: The White beauty ideal as science; title: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach names White people "caucasian"; title: Germaine de staèl's German lessons; title: Early American White people observed; title: The first alien wave; title: The education of Ralph Waldo Emerson; title: English traits; title: Emerson in the history of American White people; title: The American school of anthropology; title: The second enlargement of American whiteness; title: William Z. Ripley and the races of Europe; title: Franz Boas, dissenter; title: Roosevelt, Ross, and race suicide; title: The discovery of degenerate families; title: From degenerate families to sterilization; title: Intelligence testing of new immigrants; title: The great unrest; title: The melting pot a failure?; title: Anthroposociology : the science of alien races; title: Refuting racial science; title: A new White race politics; title: The third enlargement of American whiteness; title: Black nationalism and White ethnics; title: The fourth great enlargement of American whiteness.