German thinkers classified western Europeans, counterintuitively, as ‘Caucasian’. Whiteness received the authoritative imprint of the emerging sciences in the 18th century. Just as scientists sought to create a taxonomy of the natural world, many of the same thinkers sought to create taxonomies of human beings, categorizing them by allegedly unique racial characteristics. A significant portion of the book deals with the history of “scientific racism”, an effort to establish the concept of race as a biological category. These paintings and sculptures became hugely popular in the United States and Europe and even German Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant made use of their image in his argument that standards of beauty are universal (and that white people are the universal standard).Įuropeans used their emergent scientific revolution to buttress their self-serving conceptions of aesthetics and race. Painter examines one of the more interesting when she looks at the history of the odalisque, 19th century artistic representations of white (usually glistening white) female slaves in Ottoman Turkish settings. The alleged connection between beauty and whiteness emerged from disparate sources. “White is beautiful” slowly became the dangerous idea that piloted western conceptions of identity and difference.
Painter takes us deep into antiquity to accomplish her task, examining ideas of human difference in the Greco-Roman world and the growth of the pernicious notion that beauty and whiteness are the peanut butter and jelly of cultural identity. She shows, through the weight of historical evidence, that whiteness is a construction of the powerful, a metaphor the privileged use to define themselves, and a concept “driven by an age old social yearning to characterize the poor as permanently other and inherently inferior”. Painter’s brilliant study forces its readers to look hard at the concept of race, specifically the meaning of “being white”.
Its also a much needed book at a time when, despite the mapping of the human genome that tells us otherwise, public opinion tends to regard race as a biological fact rather than a social construction. In fact, it’s a deeply serious, and highly accessible study, of the concept of race itself. The title of acclaimed historian Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People may sound a bit like Christian Landers satirical Stuff White People Like.
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