Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), 496 pp., $27.95.
The History of White People
NELL IRVIN Painter's title is somewhat misleading. This is not a history of white people. It is a history, breezy and effective, of how certain white people came to invent the concept of "whiteness." More precisely, it is a genealogy of how certain Europeans and some Americans came to distinguish not only between themselves and others of different colors, but between themselves and others of (more or less) the same color. Today, it is widely assumed that race is largely a matter of differentiation between "Blacks" and what the U.S. Census Board still quaintly calls "Caucasian." What is forgotten, or simply ignored, is that for a crucial period in the history of the United States-from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries-what mattered most was not the line between "Whites" and "Blacks"; it was the near-impossible distinction between "Anglo-Saxons" or "Teutons," as they were sometimes called, and others of European origin-Celts, Italians, Poles, etc. It is, except among scholars, a now largely forgotten history; yet, it is also a very recent one. Nell Irvin Painter has done an invaluable service in resurrecting it in a complex, lively manner, which despite the fact that so much of the material she has to deal with is perverse, turgid and obscure-not to say downright nasty-never fails to catch the reader's imagination.
