so who's white? turns out the answer is fluid

mar 27th, 2010

for instance, japanese were 'honorary whites' in apartheid south africa. as the review says, many who are now considered 'white' were not so earlier. in particular, i claim arabs are whites, but they are not treated as such. 

there is a theory that there are only white, black and yellow races. however, this is problematic in view of the a good deal of genetic evidence that:

a. homo sapiens originated in africa

b. one branch went to india and further to southeast asia (their remnants, with the old genes, i believe are found in remote places like the andamans and nilgiris)

c. the giant explosion of mt toba in sumatra caused almost all humans in india to die

d. the southeast asians came back to india

e. one group went west to iran and thence to europe (white)

f. one group went east (yellow)

so it appears we are all mongrels. 

also, the entire 'science' of physiognomy was shown to be like the 'history' written by india's 'eminent historians' -- that is, a total fraud. measuring skulls and jaws and all that provide no causal connection with intelligence. in fact, almost all physical differences can be attributed to climate, food supply, etc. one very good reason the various 'races' are not so distant from each other -- the ease with which we inter-breed. there is fundamentally no difference other than the amount of melanin in the skin. 

it's only recently that jews, italians and irish became 'white'. at the JFK memorial in boston, there are copies of newspaper ads from the 1800s that say 'irish need not apply'. until world war II, there were plenty of hotels in the US south that had signs that said 'jews and negroes not welcome'. 

when indians become rich, we will be -- surprise, surprise -- whites!

there is also the story of indians in the US in the early 1900s. in order to exclude the chinese, the yanks ruled that only caucasians could get citizenship. indians applied, and got, citizenship on the grounds that they were caucasian. then the yanks turned around and said, 'only white caucasians can get citizenship', and revoked the indians' passports!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: H

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/books/review/Gordon-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema1

 

 

Sunday Book Review

 

Who's White?

Who's White?

 

By LINDA GORDON

Published: March 25, 2010

Nell Irvin Painter's title, "The History of White People," is a provocation in several ways: it's monumental in sweep, and its absurd grandiosity should call to mind the fact that writing a "History of Black People" might seem perfectly reasonable to white people. But the title is literally accurate, because the book traces characterizations of the lighter-skinned people we call white today, starting with the ancient Scythians. For those who have not yet registered how much these characterizations have changed, let me assure you that sensory observation was not the basis of racial nomenclature.

 

THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE

By Nell Irvin Painter

Illustrated. 496 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95

 

Robin Holland

Nell Irvin Painter

Nell Irvin Painter

Some ancient descriptions did note color, as when the ancient Greeks recognized that their "barbaric" northern neighbors, Scythians and Celts, had lighter skin than Greeks considered normal. Most ancient peoples defined population differences culturally, not physically, and often regarded lighter people as less civilized. Centuries later, European travel writers regarded the light-skinned Circassians, a k a Caucasians, as people best fit only for slavery, yet at the same time labeled Circassian slave women the epitome of beauty. Exoticizing and sexualizing women of allegedly inferior "races" has a long and continuous history in racial thought; it's just that today they are usually darker-skinned women.

"Whiteness studies" have so proliferated in the last two decades that historians might be forgiven a yawn in response to being told that racial divisions are fundamentally arbitrary and that deciding who is white has been not only fluid but also heavily influenced by class and culture. In some Latin American countries, for example, the term blanquearse, to bleach oneself, is used to mean moving upward in class status. But this concept — the social and cultural construction of race over time — remains harder for many people to understand than, say, the notion that gender is a social and cultural construction, unlike sex. As recently as 10 years ago, some of my undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin heard my explanations of critical race theory as a denial of observable physical differences.

I wish I had had this book to offer them. Painter, a renowned historian recently retired from Princeton, has written an unusual study: an intellectual history, with occasional excursions to examine vernacular usage, for popular audiences. It has much to teach everyone, including whiteness experts, but it is accessible and breezy, its coverage broad and therefore necessarily superficial.

The modern intellectual history of whiteness began among the 18th-century German scholars who invented racial "science." Johann Joachim Winckelmann made the ancient Greeks his models of beauty by imagining them white-skinned; he may even have suppressed his own (correct) suspicion that their statues, though copied by the Romans in white marble, had originally been painted. The Dutchman Petrus Camper calculated the proportions and angles of the ideal face and skull, and produced a scale that awarded a perfect rating to the head of a Greek god and ranked Europeans as the runners-up, earning 80 out of 100. The Englishman Charles White collected skulls that he arranged from lowest to highest degree of perfection. He did not think he was seeing the gradual improvement of the human species, but assumed rather the polygenesis theory: the different races arose from separate divine ­creations and were designed with a range of quality.

The modern concept of a Caucasian race, which students my age were taught in school, came from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of Göttingen, the most influential of this generation of race scholars. Switching from skulls to skin, he divided humans into five races by color — white, yellow, copper, tawny, and tawny-black to jet-black — but he ascribed these differences to climate. Still convinced that people of the Caucasus were the paragons of beauty, he placed residents of North Africa and India in the Caucasian category, sliding into a linguistic analysis based on the common derivation of Indo-European languages. That category, Painter notes, soon slipped free of any geographic or linguistic moorings and became a quasi-­scientific term for a race known as "white."

Some great American heroes, notably Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, absorbed Blumenbach's influence but relabeled the categories of white superiority. They adopted the Saxons as their ideal, imagining Americans as direct and unalloyed descendants of the English, later including the Germans. In general, Western labels for racial superiority moved thus: Caucasian → Saxon → Teutonic → Nordic → Aryan → white/Anglo.

The spread of evolutionary theory required a series of theoretical shifts, to cope with changing understandings of what is heritable. When hereditary thought produced eugenics, the effort to breed superior human beings, it relied mostly on inaccurate genetics. Nevertheless, eugenic "science" became authoritative from the late 19th century through the 1930s. Eugenics gave rise to laws in at least 30 states authorizing forced sterilization of the ostensibly feeble-minded and the hereditarily criminal. Painter cites an estimate of 65,000 sterilized against their will by 1968, after which a combined feminist and civil rights campaign succeeded in radically restricting forced sterilization. While blacks and American Indians were disproportionately victimized, intelligence testing added many immigrants and others of "inferior stock," predominantly Appalachian whites, to the rolls of the surgically sterilized.

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