Stephen's guest sounds worth staying awake for. Historian (and Princeton Professor Emeritus)Nell Irvin Painter's last book was Creating Black Americans: African American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present , which I mention only because I like the way it bookends with her current book, The History of White People. Here's part of the publisher's description:
A mind-expanding and myth-destroying exploration of "whiteness"—an illuminating work on the history of race and power.
Eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter tells perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history. Beginning at the roots of Western civilization, she traces the invention of the idea of a white race—often for economic, scientific, and political ends. She shows how the origins of American identity in the eighteenth century were intrinsically tied to the elevation of white skin into the embodiment of beauty, power, and intelligence; how the great American intellectuals— including Ralph Waldo Emerson—insisted that only Anglo Saxons were truly American; and how the definitions of who is "white" and who is "American" have evolved over time.
I found an NPR interview (with excerpt), an article about one of her book tour appearances, and more reviews than I really expected to find, mostly from sources I've never heard of. Here's Booklist (via Amazon):
Painter is the author of Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (1996) and several other scholarly works on the history of slavery and race relations in America, most recently Creating Black Americans (2006). Her latest selection examines the history of "whiteness" as a racial category and rhetorical weapon: who is considered to be "white," who is not, what such distinctions mean, and how notions of whiteness have morphed over time in response to shifting demographics, aesthetic tastes, and political exigencies. After a brief look at how the ancients conceptualized the differences between European peoples, Painter focuses primarily on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There, the artistic idealization of beautiful white slaves from the Caucasus combined with German Romantic racial theories and lots of spurious science to construct an ideology of white superiority which, picked up by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other race-obsessed American intellectuals, quickly became an essential component of the nation’s uniquely racialized discourse about who could be considered an American. Presenting vivid psychological portraits of Emerson and dozens of other figures variously famous and obscure, and carefully mapping the links between them, Painter’s narrative succeeds as an engaging and sophisticated intellectual history, as well as an eloquent reminder of the fluidity (and perhaps futility) of racial categories.
And here's from a review at the Buffalo News:
No, the title is not a joke. It’s not some tongue-in-temple spoof for a post-Jon Stewart world on the order of the Web sites (and books) called "Stuff White People Like." This is a serious and uncommonly important book whose title, more accurately, would be "The History of the IDEA of White People." (Painter admits she might have titled her book "Constructions of White Americans From Antiquity to the Present.")
That idea, as Painter tells the story, is only a few centuries old. "Race is an idea, not a fact," writes Painter. "Its questions demand answers from the conceptual rather than the factual realm." At the same time, she isn’t underestimating or ignoring "the overwhelming importance of black race in America." It’s just that "in comparison with this preoccupation, statutory and biological definitions of race remain notoriously vague—the leavings of what is not black." ...
This goes into the history of "race science" and politics, with all due complexity but utterly unavoidable wit (ideas of race, for instance, always being subject to the stronger vicissitudes of sex and libido) and even more unavoidable tragedy in a country where "the face of poor, segregated inner cities remains black." Painter’s tale neither clots with barely readable scholarship nor veers off into cable TV recklessness. A major achievement.
Looks like another book to add to the stack.
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