The History of White People
Nell Irvin Painter, a professor of American history at Princeton, wrote this about the development of racism in white culture. Painter is African-American, and I found it incredibly interesting to read her take on white supremacy across the ages. Apparently the real start of "whiteness" as a self-definition was during the Enlightenment. Painter goes back further, though, all the way to ancient Greece. It's an excellent book, if a hard one to read. At more than one point it made me embarrassed to be a human, or an American, or white. Not because I feel shame over any of these things, but because I loathe the fact that there are so many shitty people in this world. Some of the writings quoted in the book even come from American heroes, like Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Emerson was the one who started the mainstream spread of white race theory. I had no idea. I looked up some of the quotes, though -- Painter wasn't kidding. He really was a WASP bigot of the worst kind, and what made it so bad is that he had a huge audience.)
Also interesting: most WASP racism has been targeted at other whites. The Irish I knew about. But then there were people from southern and eastern Europe. Some race theorists divided whites into as many as seven "sub-races." Very little of the book is about white/black relations, actually, as most past race theorists were focused on immigrants. Blacks were nearly invisible to them. The book does, however, cover the ridiculous amount of anti-Semitism in America's history, because the men who wrote about race wrote a hell of a lot about the Jews.
My only issue with this book: too many footnotes. They're everywhere. Most pages have at least one, if not more. It's really frustrating to keep having to look down at the bottom of the page and then find my place in the main text again. But it's a great book. Check it out.
Also interesting: most WASP racism has been targeted at other whites. The Irish I knew about. But then there were people from southern and eastern Europe. Some race theorists divided whites into as many as seven "sub-races." Very little of the book is about white/black relations, actually, as most past race theorists were focused on immigrants. Blacks were nearly invisible to them. The book does, however, cover the ridiculous amount of anti-Semitism in America's history, because the men who wrote about race wrote a hell of a lot about the Jews.
My only issue with this book: too many footnotes. They're everywhere. Most pages have at least one, if not more. It's really frustrating to keep having to look down at the bottom of the page and then find my place in the main text again. But it's a great book. Check it out.