Nell Irvin Painter is an African-American historian at Princeton. I just finished her fascinating History of White People. The big story is what a slippery category “White” is, and how many today considered “White” used not to be.
My German and Scots-Irish ancestors, some of whom probably arrived as indentured servants (i.e. temporary slaves), were called “guano” (birdsh*t) by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1851. Emerson of course placed Anglo-Saxon English at the top of the racial hierarchy.
But my ancestors later made it into the top in solidarity against new waves of “black” Irish Catholic immigrants in the mid-19th century, considered to belong to the inferior Celtic race.
Irish Catholics in turn were moved up into whiteness when the “swarthy” southern Europeans and eastern European Jews arrived in the late 19th century and early 20th century. These latter would become “white” in the 20th century, but not before racist hysteria slammed the American immigration door shut just before Jews and others desperately needed to escape from fascism in Europe.
Painter ranges far and wide, detailing efforts to define the poor as a separate race, and poverty a hereditable condition. Not to mention nonsense about skull measurements, and mythical histories of mythical peoples like Saxons, Nordics, and Aryans, all in a desperate attempt to have a bright line between White and non-White.
Now we know that no such line exists, but not before “race experts” spent a couple generations in power in the academic establishment. Good cautionary tale for being careful and modest when we attempt to talk about ethnicity and development today.
9 Comments
First, your post ends as though you had more to say.
Second, histories like Painter’s are critical. But how does book knowledge that race is socially constructed go up against centuries/generations of policies (land, residential, economic, health, etc) and “common sense” notions (pop culture, identity myths, etc) that still enforce racial segregation or inequality? The former seems quaintly academic when compared to the latter.
All that to say… Painter’s history must be taught in “real life” for it to have much impact. Also, I’ve never been bothered by “race experts.” At least they’re honest.
I think the development challenge is to show what racist policies look like–without demonizing the people implementing them.
Interesting post.
Carla – It seems as though the purpose of the book is to bring the idea to light more than it is implementation. The very idea of bringing insidious issues to light undermines their credibility and is thus, in a sense, implementation. Certainly one does not write a history book expecting implementation but rather an understanding of the issues presented.
Logan, I agree with you re: the purpose of a history book. But as someone who divides time between academia and my “real world,” (urban minorities, immigrants, people of color struggling for upward mobility) my reaction would be impatience and frustration with the fact that it’s 2010 and *mainstream* academics are just now beginning to write (hopefully, in earnest?) of whiteness as a social construction and a problematic identity. I view this book and reaction to it from my own experience of coming from a people whose race has been problematized and studied for 400 years. Trust, I’m happy to (finally!) share that microscoping experience.
Her interpretation of Emerson is suspect. At Amazon, J. Brown left this comment:
The History of White People presents, as my title suggests, is an unbalanced and, to my eye, uninformed readers of Emerson I’ve read. This is important because Painter calls Emerson the father of American race theory.
Nell Painter does not grasp, or seem to want to grasp, the dialectical nature of Emerson’s work as she goes about building the case that he was the father of American whiteness theory. In a sustained passage, she says repeatedly that Emerson’s passages on fate and race are confused and multi-handed, that he contradicts himself, but that in the end he supports some kind of white racial ideology. Ms. Painter quotes from Emerson’s “Fate” and a related journal entry to prove her point. What Ms. Painter does not do is work with “Fate” as a whole. In it, to paraphrase a passage Painter used repeatedly to hammer her point home, Emerson wrote that races stripped from their land and forced by circumstance to move to America are prematurely used up in labor and turned into so much guano for American profit. This is hardly a celebration of Anglo Saxon virtues. Regardless, Painter says nothing about the concept of “Power” that appears a few paragraphs later in Emerson’s essay on “Fate.” Power, Emerson writes, can trump and overturn fate. In other words, races are not pre-determined to any genetic outcome. All people can seize power. DuBois certainly agreed with this. I would challenge Ms. Painter to find a black nationalist who doesn’t believe that Americans stripped Africans from their ancestral homelands, which destroyed their racial heritage (their culture), and which also enabled whites to treat African slaves like “guano.” This is exactly what Emerson is saying in Ms. Painter’s guano passage, a passage she’s obsessed with, but not obsessed enough with to actually practice the lost art of close reading the essay it comes from. Take our theoretical black nationalist to the next step, and I believe he or she would absolutely agree with Emerson that power is the key to overturning this seemingly inevitable fate of being treated like manure.
Here, by contrast to Painter, is Emerson on Race in _English Traits_ making the exact same argument that contemporary social constructivists make — that there is divergence between people of a “race” that makes the concept of race itself cultural rather than genetic, and that makes nations themselves social constructs:
“AN INGENIOUS anatomist has written a book to prove that races are imperishable, but nations are pliant political constructions, easily changed or destroyed. . . . The individuals at the extremes of divergence in one race of men are as unlike as the wolf to the lapdog. Yet each variety shades down imperceptibly into the next, and you cannot draw the line where a race begins or ends. Hence every writer makes a different count.”
It looks to me like Emerson is the father of social constructivism, not racial essentialism. Emerson, with this in mind, goes on to describe English characteristics. Painter completely ignores the fact that Emerson begins this discussion with the caveat that everything he’s saying about national characteristics is contingent and instead repeats again and again that Emerson thinks the Anglo Saxon race is essentially real.
If this is her treatment of Emerson–half-read, ignoring the dialectical nature of Emerson’s work and his tendency to show how Nature checks her tendencies at all turns, calling Emerson’s dialectical thinking “confusing” as if by way of confession–I can only imagine the veracity of the claims Ms. Painter makes about topics I’m not an expert in. She repeats a lot of academic cliches and shibboleths that are actually contested. For example, some historians have amassed large bodies of proof that white Americans didn’t invent race, but that they merely applied genetics to old habits of distinction. See, for example, _The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity_. Nonetheless, Ms. Painter repeats the (predictable, 1980s, post-structuralist-inflected, outdated, and disproven) cliche that racism itself is a white, American invention.
To many readers, this book may come as a surprise, even a revelation. To those already schooled in academic identity politics, it will come as either a laudable criticism of whiteness or as a superficial gleaning of “Whiteness Studies” with all of its attendant, non-stop complaining about progressive white culture and the perceived lapses and failures of that culture. In other words, as yet another attempt to claim that white, progressive people like Emerson invented and perpetuated racism.
What’s unfortunate about Emerson (getting back to the subject of my complaint) wasn’t his non-existent Eugenic theories. It was his turn toward nationalism and blood lust in his support of the Civil War, a war which caused more American deaths per capita than all of America’s wars combined. Regardless of Lincoln’s motives, half the war was fought by men driven by an ideal of freedom, singing “John Brown’s Body” along the way. Other individualist and anti-government abolitionists had solutions besides death and bloodshed. But not Emerson, who believed that American blood must be shed both to free the slave and to elevate American ideals. That, too, is both Emersonian and a central part of the history of white people.
I recently viewed the exhibit “Race” at Berkeley’s LHS; it was developed, I believe, by the American Anthropological Assn.
A major thrust of that exhibit was that not the notion of race, but the justification of a social hierarchy naturally derived from superior and inferior races, was an American invention of the 18th (?) and 19th centuries.
They cited, perhaps as a mea culpa, their own exhibit from a turn-of-the-century world’s fair.
I’m not a scholar of the issues, but the AAA seemed quite clear in its view of the evolution of “race” in America. More at UnderstandingRace.Org .
Thanks, Mr. Shetterly, for clarifying the position of R. W. Emerson. As he points out, there is a lot we can take issue with about Emerson, but not – unfortunately – the important point for Ms. Painter’s argument.
Another straw man up in flames…
Montag, you might try reading what Emerson actually said. It’s in “The conduct of life.” He says various races were treated like guano. He does not say they were guano. Painter is simply wrong there, and if her reading of Emerson is shallow, I’m suspicious of her reading of history in general.
Right. I am agreeing with you, but apparently not doing a good job of it.
Montag, sorry! I missed your tone. I complain about people reading too quickly on the internet, then do it myself. Must. Learn. From. This.
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