Painter announces, “biologists and geneticists. It is more cult than academic discipline, and is based on denial of the obvious. Painter writes that her book belongs to the new field of “white studies,” which was established in the 1990s. Needless to say, The History of White People has been respectfully reviewed rather than denounced as a breathtaking dismissal of an entire people. Painter’s goal is to make whites a non-people by denying their existence and erasing their history. “Whiteness,” she tells us, “is merely a “category of non-blackness,” “the leavings of what is not black” - in other words, pure negation. Professor Painter also denies that there is any such thing as white history, white culture, or white civilization.
Then she skips to the Enlightenment, where, she claims, race and whiteness were invented, and devotes most of the book to what she considers the crackpot science of race that flourished from about 1780 to 1930. She admits that some people had lighter skin than others, but that no one attached any meaning to it. Painter has written a deconstruction of what she considers the false and oppressive “social construct” of race, which was invented “by dominant peoples to justify their domination of others.” She starts with ancient Europe, where she asserts there was no such thing as white people because no one thought in terms of race. The Greek word historia means an inquiry or narrative into the events of the past.
Nell Painter, a professor of American history at Princeton, has written something she calls The History of White People, but it is not really history. Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People, W.W. Norton, 2010, 496 pp.
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