The last few weeks have subjected Americans to images of atrocities committed by black Americansunfortunately, know only too well: murders at the hands of the police and horrific but common cases of racial discrimination. These injustices have lasted for decades, with Black people protest largely alone. This time it’s different, as police brutality and anti-racist protests occurred in all 50 states, in small towns as well as in big cities, and even all over the world. The protesters are not only black this time; they display a nice range of races and ethnicitiesin the streets together to proclaim that black lives matter.
This history includes white people who view themselves as individuals without a significant racial identity, as well as white nationalists and Klansmen.
There are now calls for cultural change, for education that conveys the history of white supremacy in America and the history of black Americans as citizens and creators. Please don’t think these two are the same thing. Black history, on the one hand, and anti-Black injustice, on the other, are two separate stories, even though African American history includes the devastating toll of anti-Black atrocities.
I’m delighted to see so many flocking to black American history and white supremacy, two topics every American should know about. Because you need to know that the construction of whiteness has its own history. This history includes white people who view themselves as individuals without a meaningful racial identity, as well as white nationalists and Klansmen who march in theirs. There is so much more to white history.
Americans still struggle to understand that race is an ideology and not a biological fact, resembling more witchcraft than empirical science. Just as difficult to understand, it seems, is the idea that our idea of a great white race, which you may or may not belong to, is less than a century old.
White identity is not simply born, fully and unchanging, as most people assume. Whiteness is severely undertheorized, leaving millions unaware of a history whose constant feature is change. Whiteness has changed over time, place, and in countless situations of human classification.
Let me repeat: whiteness has a history with changing meanings. Neither academics nor ordinary people have been able to agree on the definition of white – who is white and who is not – or how many races are considered white. Disagreement reigns and has reigned since the modern scientific notion of human races were invented in the 18th century of Enlightenment. Nota Bene: invented in the 18th century.
Before the Age of Enlightenment, people classified themselves and others according to clan, tribe, kingdom, location, religion, and an infinite number of identities depending on what people thought was important to themselves and for others. Before the Age of Enlightenment, Europeans could see human difference, they could see who was tall, who was short, who had light skin, who was dark, differences that they explained according to religion, cultural habits, geography, wealth and climate, among the most usual characteristics, but not race.
But Enlightenment scholars began to classify humanity into groups called races, defined based on body measurements such as eye color, skin color, height, and skull dimensions. The most durable classification is that of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), professor at the German University of Göttingen. Blumenbach based his classification on skull measurements and divided humanity into five “varieties”, which he divided according to aesthetic preferences.
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At both ends, Blumenbach placed the skulls he considered ugly, that of the African and that of the Asian. Next to the African was the Tahitian. Alongside the Asians were the Native Americans. In the middle was Blumenbach’s “most beautiful skull” — of a young Georgian who had been a sex slave in Moscow, where she died of a venereal disease. His beautiful skull became the basis of the name given to the whites; originally from the South Caucasus (between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea), it inspired the label “Caucasian”.
The history of American whiteness since the Age of Enlightenment is full of fascinating characters. Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Franz Boas, Malcolm X, Michael Novak, and Toni Morrison have all influenced our thinking about whiteness. I wrote a long book about how this thinking evolved, conveniently titled “The History of the White People,” which develops what I have just said.
It is too easy to think that Irish, Italian, Slavic, or Greek immigrants and their children “become” white. But this rhetorical construction ignores how Americans viewed whiteness before the 1940s. Then race scientists and ordinary people believed that there were several white races, such as the Celtic (Irish) race, the Italian race of northern, the Eastern European Hebrew race, the southern Italian race, etc., which were ranked from high to low. the Anglo-Saxon/Saxon/Teutonic/Norse white race in the lead, depending on when you were talking and who you were talking to. Adult male immigrants from these supposedly inferior white races could vote while American-born black men could not.
Why were the 1940s such a turning point? Because the Nazis in Germany were committing racist crimes while claiming that Jews were racially different from Germans.
Why were the 1940s such a turning point? Because the Nazis in Germany were committing racist crimes while claiming that Jews were racially different from Germans, that Jews were not Aryans, which an embarrassing proportion of Americans also believed, for example Henry Ford, a ardent anti-Semite.
In the 1940s, when another world war loomed and national unity was a top priority, pundits taught Americans that whiteness was unitary, a key element used to support anti-Black segregation.
Unitarian whiteness endured until the late 20th century, when immigrants from Latin America and Asia complicated the classification of American races. We now live in a time where race (black, white, etc.) coexists with ethnicity (Hispanic, non-Hispanic). Who knows what classifications the future will bring? Some things we can already see is that whiteness was more valuable when exclusionary laws and customs protected it, the laws are no longer enforceable and the customs are abandoned as Americans trample the color bars and marry whoever they want, regardless of race. At the same time, whiteness continues to be reconstituted, as Hispanic Americans are increasingly declaring themselves being white, with a constellation of Americans who boast mixed race and a kaleidoscope of skin tones.
Whiteness isn’t done with us yet, but it doesn’t have to be the same whiteness it was two or three generations ago, despite the heroic efforts of white nationalists to shore it up with guns. This is a good thing. Since the George Floyd protests, fewer and fewer white Americans are now able to unthinkingly view themselves as non-racialized individuals with no role to play in undoing white supremacy. May their embrace of human rights, especially black rights, once again change the meaning of American whiteness.