The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter

 The history provided by Nell Irvin Painter's book begins with the ancient Greeks who considered the northern regions as a good source of slaves. (The word "slave" originates from the name for Slavic peoples (Slavs) in Eastern Europe.) It progresses through the medieval era to the Enlightenment as writers and philosophers tried to create a science of race by classifying human races in a manner similar to Linnaeus’ classifications for plant and animal life. The history then includes the development of the social aspects of race as the definition of “white” expands in response to waves of immigration and assimilation. Finally the history reaches modern DNA analysis and the discovery of more variations within races than between them.

The following are my comments regarding select items from the book that caught my attention. They’re not necessarily important or significant facts, only miscellaneous details of interest to me.

Caucasian
This word is still a synonym for white or European in the English language, but its original meaning as a race classification is obsolete. Even given our understanding now that Blumenbach’s (1752 – 1840) reasoning was bogus, I have always thought the Caucasus region as the originating location for the human species as strange. Why not select a region more centrally located in Europe? The book didn’t suggest this, but I think he was influenced by the thought that the Caucasus area was about where the Biblical Garden of Eden was located. At any rate this theories claimed to be based on his study of human skulls, and he seems to have fallen in love with the skull of a young female slave from the Caucasus. That skull was apparently so well proportioned that he concluded it must be representative of the first humans before other “races” evolved due to adaptation to different climates and geography. 

White Slaves 
The fact that the word “Slavs” as a people ended up being the word used for slaves in both Roman and Greek languages certainly suggests that during ancient times whiteness must have been associated with being a slave. Painter's book reminded me that Saint Patrick was a slave in his younger years. Also, Defoe’s fictional Robinson Crusoe was a slave in North Africa for several years prior to his becoming stranded on an island. Painter’s book does not mention Crusoe's involvement as a slave owner, but I happen to recall from my reading of the novel that before his shipwreck he was planning another voyage to Africa to acquire more slaves. Then after his years on the island he is able to reclaim the profits of his sugar estate in Brazil which used slave labor. Defoe wanted to create a wealthy hero and the best way to become wealthy in his time was through the trading and use of slaves, thus highlighting the pervasive nature of slavery in the colonial economy. 

Anglo-Saxon
Much of Painter’s book reads as a review of literature written about human races, and in doing so many writers, philosophers, and anthropoligist are quoted and discussed. The superiority of Anglo-Saxon ancestry was one theme of many writers. Promotors of Anglo-Saxon superiority included the English people within this category, but how does one explain the influence of the Norman invasion of 1066? It’s comical how that was explained away by pointing out that the Norman’s weren’t really French, but rather they were descendants of Viking invaders of an earlier era (thus saving Englishmen from the taint of French blood). Not all of Germany qualified for the label of Anglo-Saxon; those in southern Germany were deemed to be of the Alpine race. Other writers preferred to extoll the Nordic race as even better than Anglo-Saxon. These writers couldn’t believe the Ancient Greek and Roman populations were similar to those living in those regions now. They explained the inferiority of current day Greeks and Italians was due to their being the result of many years of mixing with former slaves from inferior races. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I was surprised to learn about how much this famous transandeantalist wrote on the subject of race. He was one of those who supported the concept of Anglo-Saxon superiority. He was anti-slavery, and his writing can be cherrypicked for generous sentiments regarding American identity. But overall much of his writing would be unacceptably racist viewed from today’s perspective. Painter explains that Emerson was a product of his time, and his elegant writing made him an enabler. 

Since his views were already circulating in the United States and Great Britain, Emerson cannot be seen as an originator. He was what we might nowadays call an enabler. Nonetheless, by phrasing bromides in his learned and graceful prose, he endowed them with his own substantial intellectual prestige. No matter how contradictory and obtuse, they circulated as American orthodoxy. 

Degenerate Families
As the American definition of whiteness tended to expand over time the promotors of pseudoscientific racial theories came up with the concept of "degenerate families" to explain why some people who may have white skin but are still defective are such due to "hereditary degeneracy." This label was used to justify forced sterilization or segregation. This following quote from the book summarizes a number of names used to label unacceptable people (i.e. nonwhite) 

...the feebleminded Juke-Kallikak-Polish-Russian-Jewish-French-Canadian-mongrelized-Alpine Under-Man.

White
Painter refers to four expansions of the social definition of American whiteness. Prior to the Civil War only white Anglo Saxon Protestants could be real Americans citizens in a normative sense. In particular the Irish were not included. The flood of Catholic Irish immigrants caused the descendants of earlier Protestant Irish immigrants to begin calling themselves Scotch-Irish. Then after the Civil War the immigration from Eastern European and Mediterranean countries (Jews and Italians) cause the Catholic Irish seem less objectionable and whiteness expanded to include them. Then the various ethnic groups served together during World War II and after that war those from Eastern Europe and Mediterranean seemed less objectionable. Then the Civil Rights movement and opening of many immigration limits from Asian countries expanded concept of white. Painter's suggests that anyone with sufficient income to be comfortably middle class can claim now to be white (most of the time and in most places), but being poor with dark skin still carries a prejudicial stigma.