The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  Fig. 28.1. Question 6 from 2000 U.S. Census.

  We have already seen the lowering of racial boundaries starting in the 1940s, when “ethnic” began replacing “race” as applied to the descendants of European immigrants. The use of “racial groups” for white people has become a moribund category, too, partly because white people are so mixed up. Finally, the perquisites of mere whiteness count for less in the present situation, while the stigma of blackness—once just one drop sufficed to curse the white-looking individual—also seems less mortal.

  Back in the twentieth century, white people were assumed to be rich or at least middle-class, as well as more beautiful, powerful, and smart. As citizens and scholars, they said what needed to be known and monopolized the study of other people—with themselves hardly being marked or scrutinized in return. Think of Francis A. Walker and William Z. Ripley, for whom formal education, New England ancestry, and useful connections assured authority. Half a century later, the upheaval of the civil rights era turned the looking glass around, bringing white people under scrutiny. Think of Malcolm X and James Baldwin.

  WITH THE American South so fully in the spotlight during the civil rights revolution, one of the earliest scrutinizers of whiteness came from north Georgia. Lillian Smith (1897–1966), a white southern essayist, novelist, and (with her lifetime partner Paula Schnelling) operator of a fancy summer camp for girls, powerfully described her South in Killers of the Dream (1949 and 1961). The book pilloried southern culture as pathological and white supremacist southerners as caught in a spiral of sex, sin, and segregation.5* Here was a book of wide influence that portrayed whiteness as morally diseased.

  Following Smith, two white Texan journalists turned a critical gaze on white people by passing as black. John Howard Griffin (1920–80) dyed his skin black and traveled throughout the South, researching a magazine series published as Black like Me in 1961. An international bestseller, Black like Me became a feature film in 1964. (Gerda Lerner, then a writer, later a pioneering historian of women, wrote the screenplay.) White southerners in Black like Me were indeed a perverted, disgusting crowd. The women dehumanized their black neighbors with the “hate stare” the men’s notions of blackness began and ended pornographically.6 Griffin, in turn, inspired Grace Halsell (1923–2000), whose dyed skin turned her into a strange-looking black woman, but black enough to pass and to attract racist insult, in the North and the South, as she chronicled in Soul Sister (1964).7* By the 1990s, whiteness was no longer the invisible norm, and the critical study of white people was burgeoning into an academic field in the mold of black studies.8

  Critical white studies began with David R. Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class in 1991 and Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White in 1995. Seeing slavery and black people as central in creating nineteenth-century white identity, these two books show how working-class European immigrants, Irish in particular, took advantage of being classified as white in the American context. Irishmen took control of workplaces, unions, and politics, crucial steps in their upward mobility. It soon followed that middle-class status transformed them fully into Americans.

  An abundance of books and articles dissecting the meanings of whiteness followed.9 Whiteness studies hold white race, ordinarily invisible in the black/white dichotomy, up to the light. In them it appears as social, not biological, a powerful social construct letting whites think of themselves first and foremost as individuals. Although white people may exempt themselves from race, white privilege comes into view as a crucial facet of white race identity. At the same time, many other characteristics—class, region, gender, age, able-bodiedness, and sexual orientation—all affect the manifestation of this privilege.

  Nowadays, whiteness studies analyze the porous nature of contemporary racial boundaries. In contrast to their nineteenth-and twentieth-century counterparts, multiracial people may now claim their own separate category.10 In former times, however, one black ancestor, no matter how distant, could convey a permanent “taint” of blackness that made one a Negro, as in the case of Gustave de Beaumont’s title character Marie. Race was central to identity, and people were assumed to remain permanently where they were born, especially if their races were stigmatized. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Race is a controlling influence in the Jew, who, for two millenniums, under every climate, has preserved the same character and employments. Race in the negro is of appalling importance.”11 As we have seen, powerful men like Thomas Jefferson also bowed to the ideal of racial purity—he held that interracial sex would surely lead to degradation—even while contravening his view by having children in a stable, intimate relationship with one of his slaves.12 Nowadays, only white supremacists and Nazis fetishize white racial purity.

  Today the attractive qualities that Saxons-Anglo-Saxons-Nordics-whites were assumed to monopolize are also to be found elsewhere.* After a string of nonwhite Misses America, Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé Knowles are celebrated as Hollywood beauties; Vijay Singh, Tiger Woods, and the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, dominate elite sports; Robert Johnson (founder of BET network), Bill Cosby, and the financier Alphonse Fletcher Jr. have made millions; Oprah Winfrey is rich and famous. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice have been secretaries of state, and Alberto Gonzales attorney general. Even more to the point of uniting power and beauty, Barack Obama is president of the United States. First Lady Michelle Obama, whose skin color alone would have condemned her to ugliness in the twentieth century, figures as an icon of beauty and intelligence on the global stage. None of these individuals is white, but being white these days is not what it used to be.

  Thus, it is sensible to conclude that the American is undergoing a fourth great enlargement. Although race may still seem overweening, without legal recognition it is less important than in the past. The dark of skin who also happen to be rich (say, people of South Asian, African American, and Hispanic background), and the light of skin (from anywhere) who are beautiful, are now well on the way to inclusion. Is this the end of race in America?

  AT THE turn of the twenty-first century, it was starting to look that way. In 1997, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists urged the American government to phase out the use of race as a data category and to substitute ethnic categories instead.13 Geneticists studying DNA—the constituent material of genes that issues instructions to our bodies in response to our surroundings—were also concluding that race as a biological category made no sense.

  The habit of relating human heredity to the environment may be traced back to antiquity, but early nineteenth-century racial thinkers turned the notion around, deeming race a permanent marker for innate superiority or inferiority. Not until the 1850s did the influence of environment on heredity get rescued with Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Darwin described a world much older than the biblical five thousand years, reasoning that heredity was not fixed, that generation after generation, living things change in response to their surroundings.14 Race thinkers like Ripley selectively reinterpreted Darwinian evolution in the late nineteenth century, turning natural selection into a competition between unequal races. Similarly, eugenicists pitched in, reworking Gregor Mendel’s discoveries on inheritance into a theory of racial unit traits (such as intelligence) in the early twentieth century, all in the service of racial hierarchy. In 1953 the field of molecular genetics emerged with the discovery by James D. Watson and Francis Crick of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the molecule in chromosomes that carries our genes, the functional unit of heredity.* Genomes (all the genes in each cell of an organism) could be mapped as to function, first in simpler organisms like fruit flies, then in larger animals, and on to parts of the human genome. The closer to a complete human genome, the hotter grew the competition to make it complete, and the more scholars sought to interpret its meaning.15

  It was this science of molecular genetics that drove the longest nail into the theory of race. Even before the human genome mapping
was complete, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) concluded in 1995 that, in biological terms, race holds no scientific validity. Its only importance lay now in its role as a social category to strike down patterns of discrimination. Reporting on the AAAS meeting, major newspapers carried headlines proclaiming, “No Such Thing as Race, Genetic Studies Say.”16 Would this judgment hold once the entire human genome was parsed?

  In June 2000, the race, then several years old, between the National Institutes of Health (governmental organizations) and Celera Genomics (a private company) was declared a tie by president Bill Clinton in the White House.* Some of the result triggered disappointment, even dismay: for example, humans turned out to have fewer genes than expected, some 40,000 genes on 100 trillion cells, rather a letdown for those expecting the more extravagant number of 100,000, as befitting such a smart species.17 But, much more importantly, two facts shone clearly from this research: in the words of J. Craig Venter, then head of Celera Genomics, “Race is a social concept, not a scientific one. We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the same small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world.” Each person shares 99.99 percent of the genetic material of every other human being. In terms of variation, people from the same race can be more different than people from different races.18 And in the genetic sense, all people—and all Americans—are African descended.

  President Clinton closed his remarks in 2000 with an unequivocal statement: “in genetic terms all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same. What that means is that modern science has confirmed what we first learned from ancient faiths. The most important fact of life on this earth is our common humanity.” Press coverage amplified this news.

  Subsequently, an intriguing discussion on race and genetics has been afoot among Jews. One side contends that Jews have nearly always seen themselves as a race, and that studies of Jewish DNA underscore the “tribal” nature of Jewish religion.19 The other side warns about the chaos that could flow from focusing too tightly on the biological basis of Jewishness, for Jewish men and Jewish women do not share the same set of genes. While the Y chromosomes of Jewish men show a relatively high degree of similarity all over the world, they are particularly close to the configuration of Middle Easterners of any background. Jewish women’s mitochondrial DNA, in contrast, shows much less similarity, leading to the conclusion that Jewish men often married non-Jewish women.20 (It should be noted that other parts of the world also show genetic imbalances between the sexes. In Great Britain, for instance, Y chromosomes testify to the historical presence of male Vikings, while mitochondrial DNA remains more solidly Celtic, the pre-Roman genetic configuration of the islands as a whole.)21 Treating Jewishness as something in the genes risks fissuring an already heterogeneous community.

  The biological meaninglessness of classifying people according to race remained the scholarly consensus until about 2002. Then research came to light that sought to lump DNA patterns by population groups. This work produced a theory that DNA falls into five major groups—Africans, Europeans and Middle Easterners, East Asians, Melanesians, and American Indians—which happen to correspond more or less to those of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and popular views.* (True to the disorderly history of race, a study in Scientific American in 2003 reported a four-way grouping.) The New York Times illustrated its story about this research with a long colored bar graph. Only in its last paragraph does the report explain that even though all people “share most of their genetic variability in common,” the chart is based on “these genetic differences, not on the very much larger shared inheritance.”22 In short, the illustration is neither helpful nor accurate, in that it wildly exaggerates differences while omitting the overwhelming degree of similarity.23* True to racial thinking, differences were stressed and similarities played down. The idea of biological race was reemerging as genetic science.

  This sort of reinterpretation seemed eerily familiar. Liberal social scientists and geneticists feared that some geneticists were once again searching for genetic causes underlying diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular disease that reflect racial disparities likely rooted in injuries of class and history. Lost in that speculation was the certainty that those diseases stem from a complex interplay between environment and the interaction of many genes, rather than the few genes governing superficial characteristics like skin color and hair texture.24 Furthermore, rather than addressing poverty, social disarray, and unequal access to health care, genetics could reinforce the class and race status quo, thereby echoing the hereditarian gospel of early twentieth-century eugenics.25

  Between 2002 and about 2005, this emphasis on racial genetics difference made some headway in medicine, where doctors and pharmaceutical companies pushed the idea of racialized populations and racialized medicine. They were talking about black people.26 This was true even though the clearest cases of genetic diseases that occur only in particular populations, such as Tay-Sachs among people descended from European Jews, and hemochromatosis among Swedes, affect white people.27

  Racial identity, interpreted as black, also presented an ideal marketing opportunity in 2004, when the NitroMed pharmaceutical company sought approval for the first racial drug, BiDil (a combination of isosorbide dinitrate and hydralazine hydrochloride), for treatment of heart disease. In fact, BiDil was an older, often ineffective drug repackaged for black consumption. Initially rejected by the Food and Drug Administration, it was approved in 2005 and is currently advertised for use on African Americans. As a combination of two drugs available generically, it pays off nicely for the company. BiDil does help some patients with heart disease, although it is currently being marketed only to one sector of society.28

  ARGUMENTS OVER race in the human genome have subsided of late, leaving us with some intriguing data about personal appearance. Prevailing racial schemes now rest once again on concepts of skin color, hence “black” people and “white” people. But widely recognized is the fact that not only are “black” people actually various shades of brown and yellow but so too are “white” people, merely somewhat lighter and often with a lot more pink. As Blumenbach realized in the late eighteenth century, one group’s skin color shades gradually into another’s; there are no clearly demarcated lines. Some people who identify as “black” may have lighter-colored skin than others who identify as “white.” Siblings with the same mother and father can display a range of skin colors. Race may be all about pigment, but what makes people’s skin light or dark?

  Skin color is a by-product of two kinds of melanin: red to yellow pheomelanin and dark brown to black eumelanin in reaction to sunlight.29 And several genes interact to make people light or dark, reddish, brownish, or yellowish. Ancient scholars were wiser than they knew when they related skin color to climate. Today’s biologists concur. Sunny climates do make people dark-skinned, and dark, cold climates make people light-skinned. How much of which sort of melanin people have in their skin—and to what degree it is expressed—depends entirely over time on exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Melanin both protects against excessive ultraviolet radiation and allows sufficient UV radiation to enter the body. Too much UV radiation causes skin cancer and can lead to death. Two vitamins, D and B3 (folate), play crucial roles.

  Vitamin D and vitamin B3 also serve life’s central activity of child-bearing: insufficient folate impedes the growth of bone marrow, encourages neural tube defects, and disrupts the production of new cells, causing birth defects. UV radiation does not simply destroy, however; it also creates vitamin D, crucial for calcium absorption and bone growth. Not enough vitamin D from sunlight prevents the absorption of calcium, weakening the bones. In terms of reproduction, skin color manifests the balance between enough darkness for DNA synthesis and enough lightness for vitamin D absorption. As people have migrated around the world, their skin color has adjusted.

  Our species originated in Africa some 1.2 million years ago, evolvin
g from primates like chimpanzees. Chimpanzees, like most other animals, have light skin under dark hair. Shedding that thick coat of hair, humans quickly developed dark skin, and they stayed dark until leaving Africa for cloudier territory about 100,000 years ago, when residence in dark, wintry regions like northern Europe and northern Asia required another color change, this time from dark to light. Light-skinned Europeans and light-skinned Asians lost pigmentation through different genetic processes in Europe and Asia.

  People can change color through natural selection fairly quickly, within a thousand years or so, or they can do it instantly by choosing a mate whose skin is a different color.* Those in polar regions, for instance, have turned darker again over time for protection against strong ultraviolet radiation. A paucity of melanin may cost us dearly as global warming exposes the earth to increased ultraviolet radiation.

  In sum, humans change color in several ways, including seasonably and cosmetically. Those who are short on melanin are already taking steps to protect their offspring by using sunscreen and, perhaps unwittingly, by marrying darker-skinned people. Anyone in a mixed-race family knows of the impermanence of parental skin color, for the sex act immediately affects the very next generation. In addition, mutation of the SLC24A5 gene of human chromosome 15 can quickly and simply make skin more or less dark. Readers of this book will not live to see global warming’s massive affect on human skin color, but such transitions will surely occur if Homo sapiens is to persist.

  Finally, then, what can be said about skin color and race? According to race thinking, race and color must agree—hence races designated according to color, as in “black,” “white,” “brown,” “yellow,” and “red.” And race must be innate and permanent. Yet it has been obvious since the invention of racial science in the eighteenth century that skin color can change drastically from one generation to the next. All that is needed is sex between people of different colors, which has taken place as soon as people meet. Acknowledgment of the existence of people of “mixed race,” as in the U.S. census, means acknowledgment of the impermanence of race.