The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  * Present-day white nationalists resenting the burden of black slavery in terms of white guilt and black demands for redress seek to remind Americans of the history of white slavery. They Were White and They Were Slaves, by Michael A. Hoffman II, for instance, begins with the protest, “Today, not a tear is shed for the sufferings of millions of our own enslaved forefathers. 200 years of White slavery in America have been almost completely obliterated from the collective memory of the American People.” Drawing on historical scholarship, Hoffman nonetheless blames “professorcrats” and “the corporate media” for hiding information about enslaved whites from the public.

  * This Jean Chardin is not to be confused with the French still-life and genre painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779). The painter Chardin influenced nineteenth-and twentieth-century impressionist painters such as Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and the cubist Georges Braque.

  † Chardin uses the Turkish form, Cherkes, of Circassian.

  * Chardin gives the prices in ecus (crowns) worth about £3 silver each. Thus pretty young girls and livestock cost about the same per head.

  * The great European scholarly societies were a product of the seventeenth century, with the Royal Society of London founded in 1660; the most prestigious of all, the Parisian Académie Royale des Sciences, founded in 1666; and the Berlin Akademie der Wissenschaften founded in 1700. However, women were not admitted to these gatekeepers of knowledge until the mid-twentieth century: to the Royal Society in 1945, the Berlin Academie der Wissenschaften in 1949, and the Académie des Sciences in 1979. Women were long the subjects of scientific knowledge, but not acknowledged as creators of knowledge.

  * The Crimea is the Ukrainian peninsula between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.

  * William Short, so good a young friend that Thomas Jefferson called him his “adoptive son,” wrote Jefferson that amalgamation would ultimately resolve American race problems, for many mixed-race women were very beautiful. Sally Hemings—Jefferson’s enslaved, long-term consort—her mother, and her daughter with Jefferson were all reputed to be very beautiful. Jefferson never replied to Short’s letter.

  * That slavery still exists in the present day is chronicled in works such as Kevin Bales’s Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (1999), Understanding Global Slavery (2005), and Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves (2007). The odalisque has not disappeared entirely, however, as twenty-first century artists use Orientalist iconography ironically. In 2005 the American artist Ellen Gallagher created one example, in which she arranges herself as one of Matisse’s odalisques from the 1920s and places Sigmund Freud in front of her with a sketchpad.

  * In 1873, Walter Pater maintained that Winckelmann’s admiration of the bodies depicted in ancient Greek statuary “was not merely intellectual…. Winckelmann’s romantic, fervent friendships with young men [brought] him into contact with the pride of the human form.” Winckelmann disdained art depicting women, for he considered the “supreme beauty” of Greek art “rather male than female.”

  * The white marble ideal seduced just about everybody, especially race-minded experts such as the most prominent academic painter in England, Sir Frederick Leighton. In 1880 Leighton painted his self-portrait with uncolored Parthenon statuary in the background, presumably according to the plaster casts in his studio. Even Winckelmann probably realized his ancient Greeks may have painted and gilded sculpture, but he kept that suspicion to himself.

  † White plaster casts of ancient Greek statuary still figured as examples of the best in art in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s. Artists like Arshile Gorky and George McNeil worked from Greek casts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and such plaster casts served as decoration in a coffeehouse catering to artists.

  * Goethe compared Winckelmann to Christopher Columbus and concluded, “One learns nothing when one reads him, but one becomes something.” Winckelmann’s birthday (9 December) has been celebrated as a holiday in Berlin since 1828 and in Rome since 1829. Inspired by Goethe, the English intellectual Walter Pater included an essay on Winckelmann in The Renaissance (1867).

  * Faust and the Helen episode of act 3 caused Goethe great difficulty and took him more than a quarter of a century to write. Its achievement signaled Goethe’s realization that Winckelmann was wrong: Germans could not re-create the beauties of ancient Greece, no matter how fine their poetry. Goethe did not invent the Helen episode in the Faust myth. He was reworking older Germanic themes and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus.

  * Nineteenth-and twentieth-century racial scientists later termed the characteristic Camper measured “prognatism” and linked it to skin color and racial worth.

  † On the PetrusCamper.com website of Camper’s biographer Miriam Claude Meijer, this is the only image associated with Camper’s work.

  * In 1779 Camper presented his ideas to skeptical learned men in Göttingen, including the young Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Over the years, Blumenbach grew ever more doubtful of the validity of Camper’s system, rejecting it as too simple to provide scientific data. Lavater outlived Camper and also came to harbor reservations regarding the usefulness of the facial angle.

  * Not least was the London Royal Society, over which the wealthy naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, baronet, presided. Hunter so cherished his membership in the Royal Society that he named his only surviving son John Banks Hunter. After Hunter’s death, in 1793, Banks refused the gift of Hunter’s painstakingly collected 13,682 dried and wet animal specimens, not considering it to be “an object of importance to the general study of natural history.” After being shifted from place to place in London following Hunter’s death, two-thirds of the collection disappeared in the Nazi bombing of London in 1941. Like many others interested in presenting humanity hierarchically, Hunter was a conservative who “would rather have seen his museum on fire than show it to a democrat.”

  † White advocated natural childbirth; his Treatise on the Management of Pregnant and Lying-in Women, published in 1773, was translated into French and German and appeared in an American edition as well. White had studied medicine in London with John Hunter’s brother William, to whom he dedicated the treatise.

  ‡ A well-respected medical doctor in his own right, White also published notes from John Hunter’s lectures in anatomy, as well as treatises on gynecology and obstetrics.

  * In Query XIV in Notes on the State of Virginia, written in the early 1780s, Jefferson asks rhetorically, “Is not the foundation of greater or less share of beauty in the two races [of importance]? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one preferable to that eternal monotony which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?”

  * The great Linnaeus, the inventor of the Western system of taxonomy, shot high even faster. After one week he received his Ph.D. for a thirteen-page dissertation from the Dutch University of Harderwijk, which one historian of science designated as a “mail-order” institution. This seems unduly harsh. Nevertheless, the University of Harderwijk was known for selling degrees.

  † Blumenbach’s prime years in the last quarter of the eighteenth century coincided with his university’s apogee.

  * Germany’s National Socialist regime took such anthropological collecting of skeletons and skulls to a perverted, murderous extreme.

  † Less gently than Blumenbach, Buffon criticized Linnaeus for confusing monsters with races. Linnaeus also associated geography with temperament, a linkage that became commonplace in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  * To explain his addition of the new group “Malay,” Blumenbach cites the account of Johann Reinhold Forster (1729–98) of Captain James Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific (1772–75), on which Forster and his son Georg (1754–94) headed a team of naturalists. Of English background, both Forsters lived and worked in Germany. They published accounts of the voyage: Georg
Forster, A Voyage round the World, in His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution, Commanded by Capt. James Cook, during the Years 1772, 3, 4, and 5 (1777); and Johann Reinhold Forster, Observations Made during a Voyage round the World, on Physical Geography, Natural History, and Ethic Philosophy (1778). Johann Reinhold Forster was accepted into the Royal Society in 1771, Georg Forster in 1777, sponsored by Sir James Banks.

  * The most accessible discussion of Blumenbach and his fivefold racial classification lies in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), esp. 401–12. However, as Thomas Junker points out, Gould’s visual representation of Blumenbach’s “racial geometry” conveys a misleading impression. See Junker, “Blumenbach’s Racial Geometry,” Isis 89, no. 3 (1998): 498–501.

  * Blumenbach places Caucasians as far east as the river Ob’. One of Russia’s greatest rivers, the Ob’ flows north out of central Asia, passing Novosibirsk, Russia’s third most populous city, and empties into the Kara Sea.

  * Here, as would other so-called authorities in race thinking, Blumenbach falls back on the authority of untutored observers to reinforce his scientific truths.

  * Asch had begun his medical studies in Tübingen and then finished them in Göttingen in 1750, with the famous Albrecht von Haller, before Blumenbach’s time. Asch was born in the same year as Blumenbach’s brother-in-law, the classicist Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812), who was responsible for the Göttingen University library. The Asch-Heyne correspondence, begun in 1771, holds over 120 letters from Asch to Heyne, many accompanying Asch’s generous gifts to the Göttingen University library. In Göttingen, Asch is known as one of the library’s foremost patrons, for in addition to sending Blumenbach numerous skulls, he also enriched the university library’s collection with gifts of Slavic and Persian books.

  * In the twentieth century, the most famous of the people from the Georgia of Russian fame was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (1879–1953), better known as Joseph Stalin (“Man of Steel”), whose relentless use of power largely overshadowed considerations of his looks.

  * Meiners’s life is not nearly as well documented as Blumenbach’s. The fullest recent sources for information in his regard are found in the work of Dougherty, Zantop, Britta Rupp-Eisenreich, and Carhart, mentioned in this chapter’s endnotes.

  † Organizations like the Royal Societies of London and St. Petersburg and Göttingen’s own Royal Scientific Society brought together “scholars and moneybags” from across the Western world.

  * The popular Berlin writer August Lafontaine (1758–1831) published a four-volume satiric novel making fun of Meiners and his ugly dark and beautiful blond people in 1795–96.

  * De Staël’s mother was famous as the love of the author Edward Gibbon and the host of a noted Parisian salon. The equivalence between £80,000 in 1786 and US$1.5 million today can only be approximate, given the difference in currency and the passage of so much time.

  * Early in the nineteenth century Wilhelm von Humboldt set German education on the classics, thereby furthering German Grecomania. Founded in 1810, the University of Berlin became known as Humboldt University when Germany and Berlin were partitioned between Western and Soviet spheres after the Second World War. In 1948 scholars from Humboldt founded the Free University in West Berlin. Since German reunification in the 1990s the two universities in Berlin have lived in increasingly uneasy coexistence.

  * “Blue blood” is a nineteenth-century expression in English intended to differentiate people of the leisure class—i.e., people who do no work outside and whose veins therefore show through untanned skin—from workers whose outdoor labor darkens their skin sufficiently to mask the veins. It came into English from the Spanish sangre azul, denoting people of noble Visigothic rather than Jewish or Moorish descent.

  * The phrase comes from Charles Sainte-Beauve (1804–69), a prominent mid-nineteenth-century French literary critic and member of the Académie Française.

  * De Staël met her last partner in love, Albert-Jean-Michel Rocca (1788–1817), a Swiss hussar, in the winter of 1810–11, when she was forty-four and he twenty-two. They had a child in 1812 and married in 1816.

  * De Staël and Villers got along famously at first in agreement on mysticism as well as philosophy. She welcomed mystics at Coppet, and at twenty-two he had published a novel, Le Magnétiseur amoureux (1787), whose basic theme was mesmerism. Even though relations between them cooled, she came to his defense in 1815 after he had been dismissed from his professorship at Göttingen.

  * With roots in Renaissance Italy, the querelle des anciens et des modernes divided scholars in France and Britain in 1690s. The Ancients advocated the respect of models from antiquity; the Moderns preferred to take their cue from their own century (in France, the century of Louis XIV).

  * Recognizing the great good On Germany could do toward fostering a German identity, Goethe dismissed her contrast between classicism and romanticism as unimportant.

  * Indians appeared in the census of 1800, and colored people gained their own category in 1820; thereafter, the races broke down into white, black, and mulatto in 1850. Chinese people appeared in 1870.

  † The census of 1840 asked for the number of “free white males and females” and “free colored males and females.” By 1850 the question addressed simply “each free person in a household.” The three-fifths clause remains in article 1, section 2, paragraph 3 of the U.S. Constitution, however, in which people bound to a term of servitude—presumably white—are counted as whole persons.

  * Rhode Island delayed ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution until 1870, because legislators feared it might enfranchise members of the Celtic race. Black men had been able to vote there since 1840.

  * The tangled history of the two Saxon regions in Germany would have put Jefferson off, had he sought to trace the relationship between Hengist and Horsa—who, according to Bede (ca. 730) were Jutes—and the English and Americans of his own time. Until German unification under the Prussians, provincial borders changed with the marriages, wars, and alliances of practically every new generation of rulers.

  * Hengist (“Stallion”) and Horsa (“Horse”), legendary founders of Saxon England, were said to have come from Jutland (now part of Denmark). According to Bede in his Ecclesiastical History, King Vortigern invited them from Jutland to England in 449 to help repulse attacks by the Picts and Scots. Vortigern gave them the Isle of Thanet in gratitude. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes Hengist and Horsa joint kings of Kent.

  * Randolph-Macon College and the University of Alabama offered Anglo-Saxon before any northern college. Amherst (1841) and Harvard (1849) Colleges were the earliest non-southern institutions to teach Anglo-Saxon.

  * Reviewing Smith’s work, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, “We cannot dismiss this article without expressing the pleasure the perusal has afforded us; it is certainly a very interesting subject; whatever tends to make visible the wisdom of the Supreme Being in the world we inhabit, is of the utmost importance to our happiness; the gratification of curiosity, when excited by trivial objects, is undoubtedly pleasant; but in this instance it is a fresh support to virtue.”

  David Ramsay told Jefferson he admired his “generous indignation at slavery; but think you have depressed the negroes too low. I believe all mankind to be originally the same and only diversified by accidental circumstances. I flatter myself that in a few centuries the negroes will lose their black color. I think now they are less black in Jersey than in Carolina, their [lips] less thick, their noses less flat.” A graduate of Princeton from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Ramsey (1749–1815) married one of John Witherspoon’s daughters in 1783 in Philadelphia and bought a small plantation in South Carolina in 1792 before moving to Charleston in 1811.

  * The first edition of David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World appeared in late 1829; three more editions followed in the spring of 1830. Though differences between the editions are minor, Walker sharpened his scornf
ul indictment of white American hypocrisy.

  * After the Civil War, one of Emerson’s African American contemporaries in letters, William Wells Brown (1814–84), in The Rising Son; or, The Antecedents and Achievements of the Colored Race (1874), described early northern Europeans in terms reminiscent of those of both Herodotus and David Walker: “See them in the gloomy forests of Germany, sacrificing to their grim and gory idols; drinking the warm blood of their prisoners, quaffing libations from human skulls; infesting the shores of the Baltic for plunder and robbery; bringing home the reeking scalps of enemies as an offering to their king.”