12 See Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 536–39.
13 Editorial, Nature Genetics 24, no. 2 (Feb. 2000): no pagination.
14 Joseph L. Graves Jr., The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 155–56.
15 William S. Klug and Michael R. Cummings, Concepts of Genetics, 6th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2000), 5–7, 17–18, and Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 123–24.
16 The newspaper stories ran on 21 Feb. 1995. See Graves, Emperor’s New Clothes, 155–56.
17 Ridley, Genome, 247, and Arthur L. Caplan, “His Genes, Our Genome,” New York Times, 3 May 2002, p. A23.
18 Natalie Angier, “Skin Deep,” New York Times, 5 Feb. 2001, pp. 14–15.
19 This is the view of the journalist Jon Entine, a fellow (like Michael Novak) of the American Enterprise Institute and author of Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We are Afraid to Talk about It (2000) and Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People (2007).
20 Hillel Halkin, “Jews and Their DNA,” Commentary, Sept. 2008, pp. 37–43, and reader letters from Commentary, Dec. 2008, unpaginated. Halkin is a columnist for the New York Sun and frequent Commentary contributor.
21 Bryan Sykes, Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 279–87.
22 Nicholas Wade, “The Palette of Humankind,” New York Times, 24 Dec. 2002, p. F3. See also Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Refashioning Race: DNA and the Politics of Health Care,” differences 15, no. 3 (2004): 10.
23 Michael Bamshad and Steve E. Olson, “Does Race Exist?” Scientific American, Dec. 2003, pp. 78–85.
24 Fausto-Sterling, “Refashioning Race,” 30. See also a report from the National Human Genome Center of the Howard University College of Medicine: Charmaine D. M. Royal and Georgia M. Dunston, “Changing the Paradigm from ‘Race’ to Human Genome Variation,” Nature Genetics Online, 26 Oct. 2004.
25 Lehrman, “Reality of Race,” 33. See Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics (New York: Routledge, 1990).
26 See Sally Satel, “I Am a Racially Profiling Doctor,” New York Times, 5 May 2002, p. 56.
27 Fausto-Sterling, “Refashioning Race,” 17–18. It is often assumed that sickle-cell anemia occurs only among African-descended people, which is not the case. The sickling trait evolved in malarial regions, and people descended from such places, e.g., Italy and Greece, are also susceptible to sickle-cell anemia.
28 Michael J. Bamshad and Steve E. Olson, “Does Race Exist?” Scientific American.com 10 Nov. 2003. Bamshad and Olson conclude, “If races are defined as genetically discrete groups, no. But researchers can use some genetic information to group individuals into clusters with medical relevance.” Also Troy Duster, “Race and Reification in Science,” Science 307, no. 5712 (18 Feb. 2005): 1050–51. See also Wikipedia, “Isosorbide dinitrate/hydralazine,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Isosorbide_dinitrate/ hydralazine, and BiDil’s website, headlined, “Prescription Drug for African Americans with Heart Disease,” and showing an Asian American M.D. and an African American patient, http://www.bidil.com/.
29 The material in this section comes from several sources: Nina G. Jablonski and George Chaplin, “The Evolution of Human Skin Coloration,” Journal of Human Evolution 39 (2000): 57–106, and “Skin Deep,” Scientific American, Oct. 2002, pp. 74–82; and R. L. Lamason, V. A. Canfield, and K. C. Cheng, “SLC24A5, a Putative Cation Exchanger, Affects Pigmentation in Zebrafish and Humans,” Science 310 (Dec. 16, 2006): 1782–86. See also Rick Weiss, “Scientists Find a DNA Change That Accounts For White Skin,” Washington Post, 16 Dec. 2005, p. A01, ScientificAmerican.com, 16 Dec. 2005, Christen Brownlee, Science News Online, week of 17 Dec. 2005 (vol. 168, no. 25), and Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color.
30 Aravinda Chakravarti, “Kinship: Race Relations,” Nature 457 (22 Jan. 2009): no pagination.
31 Consider Newark, New Jersey, a place supposedly characterized by “ruin, a town known only for murder, blight, and feckless negritude…a state of spiritual and moral zombiehood…angry Zulus…a Mugabe manqué…the Heart of Newark Darkness.” Scott Rabb, “The Battle of Newark,” Esquire, July 2008, pp. 66–73, 116–17.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Chapter 1, figure 1. Courtesy of Maps.com.
Chapter 4, figure 1. http://kaukasus.blogspot.com/2007/04/young-georgian-girl.html, 29 April 2007, and http://www.flickr.com/photos/24298774@N00/108738272.
Chapter 4, figure 2. http://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Image:Ossetian _girl_1883.jpg.
Chapter 4, figure 3. Courtesy Sovfoto, Inc.
Chapter 4, figure 4. Courtesy Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Gift of the Homer Family.
Chapter 4, figure 5. Courtesy Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y., Louvre, Paris, France.
Chapter 4, figure 6. Courtesy Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y., Louvre, Paris, France.
Chapter 4, figure 7. Gift of William Wilson Corcoran. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 4, figure 8. Courtesy Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Chapter 4, figure 9. Copyright © 2009 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Musée d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.
Chapter 4, figure 10. “Book Cover” from Orientalism by Edward Said. Copyright © 1978 by Edward Said. Used by permission of Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Chapter 4, figure 11. Courtesy Thomas Zummer.
Chapter 5, figure 1. Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, N.Y.
Chapter 5, figure 2. Alinari/Art Resource, N.Y.
Chapter 5, figure 3. Courtesy Princeton University Archives. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library.
Chapter 5, figure 4. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Chapter 6, figure 1. Courtesy Niedersächsische Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek, Gottingen, Germany.
Chapter 6, figure 4. Courtesy Sovfoto, Inc.
Chapter 6, figure 5. Courtesy Niedersächsische Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen, Germany.
Chapter 6, figure 7. Courtesy Gleimhaus Literaturmuseum, Halberstadt, Germany.
Chapter 7, figure 1. Bildarchiv Preussicher Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, N.Y.
Chapter 8, figure 1. Courtesy Princeton University Archives, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
Chapter 8, figure 2. Courtesy Princeton University Archives, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
Chapter 8, figure 3. Courtesy Art Resource. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, N.Y.
Chapter 8, figure 4. Courtesy of the Yale University Library.
Chapter 10, figure 1. Courtesy Concord Free Public Library.
Chapter 10, figure 2. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.
Chapter 14, figure 2. Courtesy MIT Museum.
Chapter 15, figure 9. Courtesy New York Times archives.
Chapter 16, figure 1. Courtesy American Philosophical Society.
Chapter 17, figure 2. Courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society, WHS Image ID 63842.
Chapter 18, figure 2. Courtesy American Philosophical Society.
Chapter 18, figure 3. Courtesy Stanford University Archives.
Chapter 19, figure 1. Courtesy Arthur Estabrook Papers, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University of Albany Libraries (SUNY Albany).
Chapter 22, figure 1. Courtesy Time magazine.
Chapter 22, figure 2. Courtesy Picture History.
Chapter 22, figure 3. Photograph © 2010 Museum of Fine Ar
ts, Boston.
Chapter 22, figure 4. Photograph © 2010 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Chapter 24, figure 1. Courtesy Special Collections, Vassar College Library.
Chapter 24, figure 2. Map from “The Races of Mankind,” copyright 1943 by The Public Affairs Committee, Inc., from Race: Science and Politics, by Ruth Benedict. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
Chapter 25, figure 1. Courtesy Princeton University Archives, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library.
Chapter 25, figure 2. Courtesy Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota.
Chapter 26, figure 1. Courtesy Picture History.
Chapter 27, figure 1. Malcom X at a Harlem civil rights rally © Bettman/CORBIS. Chapter 28, figure 1. Measuring America: The Decennial Censuses from 1790 to 2000. (US Department of Commerce, US Census Bureau, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office), 2002: 100.
* We usually assume definitions of race as color to be straightforward, as though “black” Americans were always dark-skinned. But the long American history of racial adjudication—of deciding who counted legally as black and white—belies any strong equivalence between race as color and actual color of skin.
* William Sanders Scarborough (1852–1926) was a founder of the American Philological Association, which asked him not to attend meetings after 1909.
* Although Arthur de Gobineau’s racial reasoning in Essay on the Inequality of the Races was wrongheaded in the extreme, he did grasp one fact of human history: economic development leads to demographic mixing, as the demand for labor draws in people from afar.
* Although Hippocrates of Kos (ca. 460–ca. 380 BCE) became a legendary practitioner of medicine, his works come from a variety of hands, not just his. The island of Kos lies in the southeastern Aegean Sea near the historic city of Halicarnassus, Turkey.
* Hecataeus’s works include Periegesis (Description of the Earth) in two volumes: Europe and Asia. Periegesis survives as 330 very short fragments. In addition, Hecataeus wrote Genealogies (also called Histories or “researches”), a biographical dictionary of Greek heroes.
† Graz is the capital of Styria (in German, Steiermark), famous for wine and a relatively dolce vita.
* The portrait of Herodotus accompanying the Encyclopædia Britannica Online article comes from a Roman cult sculpture copied from a Greek original from the first half of the fourth century BCE.
* Herodotus’s description of the Colchians in what is now Georgia on the Black Sea is in 2.104–5. He concluded from their dark skin, curly hair, and circumcised penises that Colchians descended from Egyptian armies. Needless to say, this observation has set off a lively controversy between Afrocentrics, who take this remark as corroboration of the spread of Egyptian, i.e., African power, and skeptics, who take Herodotus’s comment on Colchians as cause to doubt his reliability as a historian.
Michael Novak, in The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, quotes a harrowing scene from Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (1965) in which a similar warrior (identified variously as Kalmuck, Tartar, or Russian) on horseback savagely rapes a captive maiden. We shall encounter Kalmucks again soon.
* Sevastopol and Yalta, the most famous names of the mild Crimean wine region of southern Russia and eastern Ukraine, now designate health resorts.
* Hippocrates adds that female servants from other, unnamed peoples were active and slender. Unlike the Scythian women, they easily became pregnant.
* Herodotus also mentions a tribute of five boys along with ivory that the Ethiopians owed Persia every third year.
† Polybius’s ideas about governmental checks and balances inspired drafters of the Constitution of the United States.
‡ The white slave trade in laborers and sex trade workers from eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Ukraine, now into western Europe and the United States, reappeared in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union deprived these regions of overweening state power and its police protection.
* Romans also divided Gaul in two other ways: between Gallia Togata, or the domesticated, Toga-Wearing Gaul, and the more barbaric Gallia Comata, or Hairy Gaul.
† An aristocrat from the central Auvergne, Vercingetorix was from near today’s city of Clermont-Ferrand, where his equestrian statue now stands in the central square. In my copy of The Gallic War, each of the first six books encompasses between fourteen and thirty-one pages; book 7, on Vercingetorix and the great revolt, is fifty-two pages long.
* François de Belleforest used the phrase in 1579 while describing Hugh Capet’s recapture of power from the Frankish aristocracy.
† The main characters in the Astérix comic books all have names built around puns playing on the common French “que” suffix’s similarity to Gallic names ending in “rix.” Thus “Astérix” comes from the idea of star in the French astérisque (asterisk); “Obélix” from obélisque (obelisk); “Idéfix” from idée fixe (fixed idea or obsession); “Assurancetourix” from assurance tous risques (comprehensive insurance), Cétautomatix from c’est automatique (it’s automatic); and Ordralfabétix from ordre alphabétique (alphabetical order).
‡ The theme of poetic, valiant defeat appears in nineteenth-century hymns to the Celts, for instance in Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867).
* Tacitus’s text occasionally served German nationalism beginning in the fifteenth century, but it really gained currency during the nineteenth-century decades of German unification and twentieth-century Pan-Germanism. Notions of German racial purity continue to turn up nowadays on white nationalist websites, such as that of the Aryan Nations: “It’s not a matter of White Supremacy it’s about Racial Purity!”
* The German tribes continued to move, war, merge, even disappear, and to split up politically, until unification under Prussia in 1870. As we know from twentieth-century history, even unification did not stabilize German boundaries. German defeat after the First World War reduced territory acquired at the expense of France and Poland in the nineteenth century. After defeat in 1945, Germany was partitioned and, in 1949, became two separate states, one in the east (the German Democratic Republic) and one in the west (the Federal Republic of Germany). After the fall of the Democratic Republic, Germany reunified in 1990.
* The Finlandic Laxdaela saga tells the story of the Irish princess Melkorla, one of the legions of Irish captured in Viking raids. After purchase in a Norwegian slave market, Melkorla was transported as a slave back to Ireland.
† Late nineteenth-century anthropology continued to associate dark color with the Irish, as in the anthropologist John Beddoe’s “Index of Nigrescence,” discussed in chapter 15 of this book.
* The Italian slave market demanded strong, very young women and girls, along with a few very young men. Slaves came through two central markets dating back to antiquity, at Tana, on the Sea of Azov at the mouth of the Don River, and at Caffa, on the Crimean shore of the Black Sea, both Genoese trading colonies. These two Black Sea markets gathered a varied crowd of traders and slaves alike.
* Salé, famous as a capital of piracy, lies on the Atlantic coast next to the Moroccan capital of Rabat.
† Overall about 1.25 million northern Christians became enslaved in the southern and eastern Mediterranean between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century.
* The titles of Defoe’s two 1722 novels dealing with Britons transported to Virginia reveal their plots: The FORTUNES AND MISFORTUNES of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was Born in NEWGATE, and during a Life of continu’d Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother) Twelve Year a Thief Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest, and died a Penitent. Written from her own MEMORANDUMS and The History of the most remarkable life, and extraordinary adventures of the truly Honourable Colonel Jacque, vulgarly called Colonel Jack, who was born a gentleman, put apprentice to a
pickpocket, flourished six and twenty years a thief, and was then kidnapped to Virginia; came back a merchant; was five times married to four whores; went into the wars; behaved bravely; got preferment; was made colonel of a regiment; returned again to England; followed the fortunes of the Chevalier de St. George; was taken at the Preston rebellion; received his pardon from the late King; is now at the head of his regiment, in the service of the Czarina, fighting against the Turks, completing a life of wonders, and resolves to die a general.
The History of White People Page 48