A Whiter Shade Of Pale

Title: The History of White People

Rating: 4 Stars

The first half or so of the book was at best moderately interesting. It went all of the way back to the Greeks and the Romans. Although they didn’t didn’t have the concept of race, they did have slaves and they did have some way of ranking people. There was a lot of talk about the historian Tacitus and of the Scythian tribes.

It continued on to discuss how Caucasians became associated with being white. This is kind of interesting because this derives from the Caucasus mountain range, which sits on the border between Eastern Europe and  West Asia. This is nowhere near the geographic area where the Nordic and Teutonic tribes, the people typically considered to be the first white people, originated.

As I said, at best moderately interesting. This section was well researched. It featured many personalities that I’d never encountered. I just found it dry and pretty slow going. The point of going through this exercise is possibly to make the point that the idea of race is, from a historical point of view, a fairly recent phenomenon. That is interesting. I’m just not sure if I really wanted to spend 100 pages getting to that fact.

I might be showing my American bias, but things did start picking up once we got into the eighteenth century. 

Regardless there were a couple of things that I found interesting as I read. One is that so many of the race theorists that preached the virtue of virile, masculine, robust men conquering and establishing the master race were themselves puny and childless hypochondriacs.

Another is that, and I know most of you will find this amazing, most of these theorists ended up claiming that their own nationality / ethnic identity was one of the dominant races. No one seemed to notice this remarkable coincidence.

I’ve talked about this in other blog posts regarding other books that I’ve read, but what Americans have considered white has been by no means static. Usually the newest wave of immigrants are not considered white. Since the first settlers by and large came from England, in the colonial times white was synonymous with Anglo.

The German immigrants in the 18th century were not therefore considered white. Eventually they were assimilated and accepted as white. Next came the Irish. Sometimes known as the black Irish, their cartoon caricatures were nearly simian. They were considered ignorant, lazy, and dirty. They were thought to be of Celtic stock, which was considered to be an inferior grade to Anglo.

Next came the Italians. Coming from Southern Europe (the opposite end from where the vaunted Nordics came from), they were also looked upon as a non-white inferior race. Later came the Eastern Europeans (eg Poles, Hungarians, and Lithuanians) that also came from a non-approved part of Europe.

For most of the first part of American history, Teutonic was considered the ideal origination of the white race. With the advent of WWI, an adjustment was quickly required since the US was now at war with the dreaded Huns. To avoid this awkward association, American white people started calling themselves Nordic.

Another interesting part of the history of race determinism is that so much of it was about splitting hairs among European ethnicities. Especially in the early days, there was so much discussion about English vs Germans vs Irish vs Italians vs Poles that little space was given to Blacks and Asians. For the purpose of race discussions, they were not even considered.

I had previously known that there was much American work in the field of eugenics. I did not truly understand the scope of this. Americans were world leaders in the field of eugenics. The main organization for eugenics was called (I shit you not) the American Breeder’s Association. Some 65,000 American women were sterilized after being identified as mental defectives. This view carried forward well into the 1930s. It was only when Hitler and the Nazi party took eugenics and started running hard with it that Americans started to realize the ramifications of their ideas.

Speaking of WWII, its advent redefined who was white in America. Since Nazis were at war with nearly all of Europe, men from all nationalities and ethnicities eagerly volunteered to fight. Thrown in together far from home with men from a wide variety of other backgrounds, this forced a cohesion that ended with a newer, broader definition of whiteness.

If nothing else, this book highlights the absurdity of race. For millennia, people have been constantly migrating, invading, merging and conquering. Men and women from different ethnicities have had sex whenever they have had an opportunity to do so. It’s been proven at a DNA level that race has absolutely no meaning.

Of all of the things that differentiate men from each other, the color of their skin is the least interesting.