The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  WHERE ARE we now? Mapping the human genome elicited initial proclamations of human kindredness across the globe. Then race talk inscribed racial difference on our genes. That talk has not disappeared, but ideally we would realize that human beings’ short history relates us all to one another. To speak in racial terms, incessant human migration has made us all multiracial.30 Does this mean the human genome or civil rights or desegregation have ended the tyranny of race in America?

  Almost certainly not. The fundamental black/white binary endures, even though the category of whiteness—or we might say more precisely, a category of nonblackness—effectively expands. As before, the black poor remain outside the concept of the American as an “alien race” of “degenerate families.” A multicultural middle class may diversify the suburbs and college campuses, but the face of poor, segregated inner cities remains black.31 For quite some time, many observers have held that money and interracial sex would solve the race problem, and, indeed, in some cases, they have. Nonetheless, poverty in a dark skin endures as the opposite of whiteness, driven by an age-old social yearning to characterize the poor as permanently other and inherently inferior.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I have worked on this book too long and in too many places to craft adequate acknowledgments, but I know I owe thanks to many people and institutions and must make a sincere try. This project grew out of an invention of the 1990s: whiteness studies. While I learned a great deal from the work of historians in that field, overall, I missed a longer, broader view than I found in work focusing on the United States. I began to undertake my own adventure into whiteness studies in classes I taught at Princeton University. My first debts, therefore, relate to History 382, “Whiteness in Historical Perspective,” and History 574, “Whiteness Studies,” to my colleagues, who encouraged my thinking out loud, my students, whose curiosity led me on, and my graduate student preceptors, Crystal Feimster and Eric Yellin, who brought their own useful insights to bear.

  When students mentioned their work in a class they abbreviated as “whiteness,” it intrigued their families and friends as a topic of study at Princeton. Early on, students reported more interest at home in my racial background than in the material we were covering. But that preoccupation subsided. In more recent years, concerns about my race seem greatly to have faded, their place taken by open curiosity about the project. For this evolution, I thank the American people.

  This project began in earnest in Germany, where my German-language teachers were Birgit Ölsanger and Renate Scherer. My scholarly colleagues in Europe—Lorraine Daston, Jeanette Demeestère, Ottmar Ette, Michael Hagner, Susanne Marchand, Renato Mazzolini, Roberta Modugno, Nicolaas Rupke, and Patricia Springborg—offered illuminating discussion of the issues from European perspectives. In the United States I have benefited from conversations and correspondence with Hans Aarsleff, Priscilla Barnum, Ben Braude, David Brion Davis, David Cannadine, Hazel Carby, William Clark, Linda Colley, John Hope Franklin, David Freund, Gary Gerstle, Robert Gordon, Annette Gordon-Reed, Anthony Grafton, Lani Guinier, Matthew Guterl, Walter Johnson, Chin Jou, Michael Keevak, Mary Kelley, John Kenfield, Mary Lu Kirsty, Max Kortepeter, Stephen Kotkin, Bruce Levine, Bernard Lewis, Niamh Lynch, Rajiv Malhotra, Mark Mazower, Kerby Miller, Eduardo Pagan, Grace Palladino, Carl Rezak, David Roediger, Carl Schorske, Richard Slotkin, Thomas Sugrue, John Sweet, Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, and Eric Yellin. I owe special thanks to Angela Rosenthal, David Bindman, and Sarah Lewis for guidance in visual analysis and to Neil Baldwin for encouragement.

  I have enjoyed presenting aspects of this project to colleagues at the Free University in Berlin, Wesleyan University, the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, the NYU Biography Seminar, the Essex, New York, Public Library, Reed College, the University of Roma Tre, and in my own Princeton Department of History. I also had the pleasure of offering facets of this work as presidential addresses to the Southern Historical Association in 2007 and the Organization of American Historians in 2008, and I owe thanks to the editorial staffs of the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History.

  This work has depended on literature, most especially on the collections and librarians in Princeton University’s Firestone Library. People whose names I do not know have helped me immensely through inter-library loan’s “Article Direct” service. I do know the names of several in Firestone who have aided me: Elizabeth Bennett, Bobray J. Bordelon, Sharon Brown, Joel R. Burlingham, Mary George, Linda Oppenheim, AnnaLee Pauls, Sandy Rosenstock, Don Simon, and Don C. Skemer. Thank you. Working often outside Princeton and New Jersey, I also appreciate the useful resource of Google Books.

  Princeton University has supported my scholarship for many years, especially through research funding from the Department of History and the Office of the Provost. Judy Hanson, Lynn Kratzer, and Pamela Long in the Department of History have kept me in touch with Princeton from Newark and beyond. My Princeton research assistants—Malinda Lindquist, Deborah Becher, and Jonathan Walton—kept me in research materials. In New York, many tasks have fallen to the assistants to Edwin Barber at W. W. Norton, most recently and heavily to Melanie Tortoroli. I also owe much gratitude to an omniscient copy editor, Otto Sonntag. My agent Charlotte Sheedy got this book off to its start, and my genius husband, Glenn Shafer, and my friend Thadious Davis have kept me going all these many years. Thank you. Thank you again.

  I have dedicated this book to its two indispensables: my gentleman-scholar editor, Edwin Barber, and the resource at its foundation, Princeton University Library.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1 See, for instance, Ariela J. Gross, “Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South,” Yale Law Review 108, no. 1 (October 1998): 109–88, and Walter Johnson, “The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s,” Journal of American History 87, no. 1 (June 2000): 13–38.

  2 See Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 2, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), and “Race, Class, and Gender in the Formation of the Aryan Model of Greek Origins, South Atlantic Quarterly 94, no. 4 (Fall 1995): 786–1008, and Michele V. Ronnick, ed., The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough: An American Journey from Slavery to Scholarship (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 175, 207, 243, 351.

  CHAPTER 1: GREEKS AND SCYTHIANS

  1 See Norman Davies, Europe: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 7.

  Nineteenth-century scholars sought an Aryan or Indo-European race of ancestors, even though cultural markers such as archaeological sites do not correlate reliably with languages or biological lineage. See Peter S. Wells, Beyond Celts, Germans and Scythians (London: Duckworth, 2001), Malcolm Chapman, The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), and J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989).

  2 In “Europa als Bewegung: Zur literarischen Konstruktion eines Faszinosum” (unpublished paper, 2001), Ottmar Ette discusses the nowhereness of the idea of Europe. Like the idea of the Caucasus, that of Europe grows out of a vague borderland. See esp. 5, 15–17.

  3 See Robert Bedrosian, “Eastern Asia Minor and the Caucasus in Ancient Mythologies,” http://www.virtualscape.com/rbedrosian/mythint.htm.

  4 Fritz F. Pleitgen, Durch den wilden Kaukasus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2000), 22–24, 26.

  5 This discussion leans heavily on Wells, Beyond Celts, esp. 74–77, 104.

  6 Hippocrates, Airs, Waters, Places, part 23, in Hippocrates, with an English Translation by W. H. S. Jones, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1923), 24.

  7 Tony Judt, “The Eastern Front, 2004,” New York Times, 5 Dec. 2004; Davies, Europe, 53. See also Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).

  8 See http://www.martinmchale.com/clan/celt
.html.

  9 See http://www.livius.org/he-hg/hecataeus/hecataeus.htm.

  10 Pergamon and Altes Museum, Berlin, in http://www.livius.org/he-hg/herodotus/herodotus03.html.

  11 “Herodotus,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 21 May 2007, http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-9040200.

  12 See O. Kimball Armayor, “Did Herodotus Ever Go to the Black Sea?” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 82 (1978): 57–62, Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization, ed. and trans. Mercer Cook (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1974), 1:115 (n. 3), and Frank Martin, “The Egyptian Ethnicity Controversy and the Sociology of Knowledge,” Journal of Black Studies 14, no. 3 (March 1984): 295–325. See also J. Harmatta, “Herodotus, Historian of the Cimmerians and the Scythians,” Giuseppe Nenci, “L’Occidente ‘barbarico,’” and discussion, in Hérodote et les peuples non grecs, ed. Olivier Reverdin and Bernard Grange, Entretiens sur l’antiquité classique, vol. 35 (Geneva: Vandœuvres, 1988), 115–30, 301–20. See also Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 96–97.

  13 Herodotus, Histories, 4.75:239.

  14 Francis R. B. Godolphin, “Herodotus; On the Scythians,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s., 32, no. 5, From the Lands of the Scythians: Ancient Treasures from the Museums of the U.S.S.R., 3000 B.C.–100 B.C. (1973–74), 137. The quotes come from Herodotus, Histories, 4. 64 and 4.65.

  15 Herodotus, Histories, 4.67:236; 4.110–16:249–51.

  16 Hippocrates, Airs, Waters, Places, part 24:135, 137.

  17 Ibid.

  18 Ibid., part 20:125.

  19 Ibid., part 18:117, 119.

  20 Ibid., parts 21–22:125, 127, 129.

  21 Ibid., part 16:115; part 23:131, 133.

  22 Ibid., part 16:115; part 23:131, 133.

  23 Ibid., part 23:133.

  24 D. C. Braund and G. R. Tsetskhladze, “The Export of Slaves from Colchis,” Classical Quarterly, n.s., 39, no. 1 (1989): 114, 118–19; M. I. Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (New York: Viking Press, 1982), 169, 173; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 149–50.

  25 British Broadcasting Corporation, “Ancient Greek Slavery and Its Relationship to Democracy,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A471467; Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, 167–73, 175.

  26 M. I. Finley, “Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labour?” in Slavery in Classical Antiquity: Views and Controversies (Cambridge: Heffer, 1968), 150–52.

  27 Herodotus, Histories, 4.1–4:215–18.

  28 Ibid., 3.97:193.

  29 Finley, “Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labour?” 146.

  CHAPTER 2: ROMANS, CELTS, GAULS, AND GERMANI

  1 Tacitus, Germania, ed. and trans. J. B. Rives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 21.

  2 The Geography of Strabo, Loeb Classical Library, 8 vols., Greek texts with facing English translation by H. L. Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917–32), book 4, chap. 4: 2, 238–39. Loeb edition on the web, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/ Thayer/E/Roman/ Texts/Strabo/home.html.

  3 The Geography of Strabo, book 7, chap. 1 (Loeb vol. 3, p. 151), http://penelope.uchicago.edu/ Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/ Strabo/7A*.html.

  4 For ancient Germans as noble savages, see Audrey Smedley, “Race,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 5 Sept. 2007, http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-234682. See also Bruce Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 37.

  5 For a broader explanation of Caesar’s career and the place of the Gallic war within it, see Arnold Toynbee, “Caesar, Julius,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 9 Sept. 2007, http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-9737. On the sale of slaves and the role of Roman slave dealing, see Julius Caesar, Seven Commentaries on the Gallic War, ed. and trans. Carolyn Hammond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 52, 62, 227.

  6 Caesar, Gallic War, xxvii, 3. Caesar’s three-way division, nowadays familiar, was contested in its time.

  7 Ibid., 181, 183, 193.

  8 Ibid., 51, 57, 66, also 104, 116, 158, 186, 193, 236–37.

  9 Ibid., 186.

  10 Ibid., 29, 31. Of languages spoken in modern France, Breton (a Celtic language) seems more closely related to the Gallic language Caesar mentions than does French, a Latin language.

  11 Ibid., 3, 131.

  12 Ibid., 124, 129–31.

  13 Ibid., 33.

  14 Ibid., 95–96.

  15 Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection, trans. and ed. John F. Healy (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1991), 89.

  16 Ibid., 42–43, 75, 376.

  17 Ibid., 75–78, 105, 122.

  18 Tacitus, Germania, 77–78.

  19 Ibid., 83.

  20 Ibid., 81–83, 86–87.

  21 Ibid., 52–57, 62–63.

  22 Ibid., 77.

  23 Ibid., 85.

  24 Ibid., 78.

  25 Ibid., 77.

  26 Caesar, Gallic War, 37, 95–96. See also Norman Davies, Europe: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 53, 84, 214–18.

  27 Peter John Heather, “Germany,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online, http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-58082; Rives, in Tacitus, Germania, 64–71.

  28 Oxford English Dictionary Online, http/dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50094001= 3fquery_type=3dword&queryword= 3dgerman&first= 3d1&max_to_show= 3d10&sort_type= 3dalpha&result_place =3d2&search_id= 3dBPKR-KKy4Nh-5252 &hilite=3d50094001.

  29 Davies, Europe, 222.

  30 See Robert J. C. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008), 16–23, and Tom Shippey, “Tests of Temper,” TLS, 17 October 2008, p. 12.

  31 Edward James, “Ancient History: Anglo-Saxons,” BBC.co.uk, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/anglo_saxons/ overview_anglo_saxons_01.shtml.

  32 Tacitus, Germania, 214.

  CHAPTER 3: WHITE SLAVERY

  1 See Robert L. Paquette, “Enslavement, Methods of,” in Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery, vol. 1, ed. Paul Finkelman and Joseph C. Miller (New York: Macmillan Reference, 1998), 306, Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, ed. Junius P. Rodriguez (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 1997), 368–69, and Junius P. Rodridguez, Chronology of World Slavery (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 1999), 51–53.

  2 James McKillop, “Patrick, Saint,” in A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology (Oxford University Press, 1998), Oxford Reference Online, http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t70.e3369.

  3 David Pelteret, “The Image of the Slave in Some Anglo-Saxon and Norse Sources,” Slavery and Abolition 23, no. 2 (Aug. 2002): 76, 81–83.

  4 Jenny Bourne Wahl, “Economics of Slavery,” in Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery, 1:271; Orlando Patterson, “Slavery,” Annual Review of Sociology 3 (1977): 420.

  5 The figures come from the Domesday Book of 1086, the Norman census of newly conquered Britain. See Robin Blackburn, “The Old World Background to European Colonial Slavery,” in The Worlds of Unfree Labor, ed. Colin Palmer (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998), 90, originally published in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., S4, no. 1 (1997).

  6 See David Turley, Slavery (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000): 142–43.

  7 Robert Brennan, “The Rises and Declines of Serfdom in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” and Christopher Dyer, “Memories of Freedom: Attitudes towards Serfdom in England, 1200–1350,” in Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage, ed. M. L. Bush (London: Longman, 1996), 271, 277–79.

  8 David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 54–55.

  9 Alan Fisher, “Chattel Slavery in the Ottoman Empire,” Slavery and Abolition 1, no. 1 (May 1980): 34–36; Iris Origo, “The Domestic Enemy: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Speculum: A Journal of Mediaeval Studies 30, no. 3 (July 1955): 312–24, 326–27, 337, 354.

  10 See Linda
Colley, Captives (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 47–52, 58, and Robert Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 3–6.

  11 “Chapter II-Slavery and Escape” and “Chapter III-Wrecked on a Desert Island,” The Project Gutenberg Etext of Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe, http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext96/rbcru10.txt.

  12 The phrase “vulnerable aliens” comes from M. I. Finley, quoted in Blackburn, “Old World Background to European Colonial Slavery,” 111.