Book of the week: The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter

(Norton, 496 pages, $27.95)

Nell Irvin Painter exercises “admirable restraint” in recounting the origins of race-based thinking, said Jabari Asim in Bookforum. The concept of race, we now know, has no basis in science, and Painter here exposes the sordid details of its surprisingly recent development. While you might expect that racism stemmed from a desire to distinguish between dark-skinned and light-skinned peoples, Painter says that the idea of a light-skinned super-race actually began when some European and American thinkers set out to differentiate themselves from “inferior” light-skinned neighbors. As Painter revisits various champions of this line of thought—from a skull-collecting doctor in 18th-century Germany to Teddy Roosevelt—she mostly lets their wrongheadedness speak for itself. To her credit, she “only occasionally resorts to such harsh but justifiable descriptions as ‘nutty’ and ‘flagrantly nonsensical.’”

Ralph Waldo Emerson is the unexpected villain of Painter’s account, said Anthony Pagden in The National Interest. The 19th-century transcendentalist may seem late to the story, but Painter stresses that race had no meaning for the greater part of Western history. The ancient Greeks had suspected that climate, not heredity, affected cultural achievement. Even the slave trade remained relatively colorblind well into its introduction into the New World. For Painter, the crucial shift occurred when Emerson, his English friend Thomas Carlyle, and others elevated an imagined Saxon or Teutonic tribe above all other light-skinned European peoples. Emerson, whom Painter has dubbed “the philosopher king of American white race theory,” thought nothing of likening whole swaths of humanity to dried bird droppings. The worst of these “guano” races, he claimed, were the Celts.

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America’s newly arrived Irish immigrants were Emerson’s chief targets, said Neil Baldwin in TheFasterTimes.com. But such arguments established a way of thinking that distorted future black-white relationships and fueled anti-immigrant hatred for decades to come. “By the time the second great immigrant wave—the Jews—engulfed our shores, prejudice was systemic.” Painter maps this immensely complicated territory masterfully, said Jeff Simon in The Buffalo News. Her narrative draws in all manner of bigots and pseudoscientists, yet “neither clots with barely readable scholarship nor veers off into cable TV recklessness.” Her title may sound fitting for an academic spoof; in fact, this book is “a major achievement.”