NYT Book Review of The History of White People

This NYT article reviews The History of White People authored by Princeton historian Nell Irvin Painter, a scholar whose academic output wonderfully illustrates OneSTDV's Law of Black Intellectualism. I respond to the article below.

But the title is literally accurate, because the book traces characterizations of the lighter-skinned people we call white today, starting with the ancient Scythians. For those who have not yet registered how much these characterizations have changed, let me assure you that sensory observation was not the basis of racial nomenclature.

The reviewer, an NYU professor of history Linda Gordon, can't help but quickly divulge the distortion that will permeate her piece. Note she deems racial classifications as "nomenclature", implying that these categories reduce to subjective demarcations reflecting inherent (European) bias.

Exoticizing and sexualizing women of allegedly inferior “races” has a long and continuous history in racial thought; it’s just that today they are usually darker-skinned women.

Really? Tyra Banks is the only full black woman to ever appear on the cover of Maxim magazine (H/T: Chuck Ross) and according to this OKCupid study, black women are considered the least attractive potential romantic partners. Since the reviewer is white, this appears to be a projected case of Sailer's Law of Female Journalism whereby a white liberal fabricates a sexual hierarchy in order to raise the esteem of non-white women.

“Whiteness studies” have so proliferated in the last two decades that historians might be forgiven a yawn in response to being told that racial divisions are fundamentally arbitrary, and that deciding who is white has been not only fluid but also heavily influenced by class and culture.

She sees racial classification as so utterly unscientific as to merit merely a "yawn". But of course, actual science doesn't always yield to the prevailing "wisdom" of PC. Noah Rosenberg of UMich found:

In one of the most extensive of these studies to date, considering 1,056 individuals from 52 human populations, with each individual genotyped for 377 autosomal microsatellite markers, we found that individuals could be partitioned into six main genetic clusters, five of which corresponded to Africa, Europe and the part of Asia south and west of the Himalayas, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas.

Loosely speaking, it is these small discontinuous jumps in genetic distance—across oceans, the Himalayas, and the Sahara—that provide the basis for the ability of STRUCTURE to identify clusters that correspond to geographic regions.

And here's more evidence concerning bone marrow donors, natural selection driving population differentiation, and this rather explicit finding showing racial groups as biologically based and corresponding to continents:

Numerous recent studies using a variety of genetic markers have shown that, for example, individuals sampled worldwide fall into clusters that roughly correspond to continental lines, as well as to the commonly used self-identifying racial groups: Africans, European/West Asians, East Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans (Bowcock et al. ¹⁹⁹⁴; Calafell et al. ¹⁹⁹⁸; Rosenberg et al. ²⁰⁰²).

She continues, summarizing the slight changes in the definition of "whiteness", all the while implying a non-static definition equates with a non-scientific concept.

In general, Western labels for racial superiority moved thus: Caucasian → Saxon → Teutonic → Nordic → Aryan → white/Anglo.

This parallels the machinations religious creationists engage in to thwart the foundations of evolution. But by such a standard, the Earth doesn't rotate around the Sun because scholars have continually updated the physics of the heavens. Science is a progressive concept; views change according to new evidence, such as that provided by the modern genomic age. The author then proceeds into the requisite denial of cognitive differences.

In the long run, the project of measuring “intelligence” probably did more than eugenics to stigmatize and hold back the nonwhite. Researchers gave I.Q. tests to 1,750,000 recruits in World War I and found that the average mental age, for those 18 and over, was 13.08 years. But I.Q. testing achieved success in driving the anti-immigration movement. The tests allowed calibrated rankings of Americans of different ancestries — the English at the top, Poles on the bottom.

FYI: Those IQ scores haven't changed despite undeniable educational and social ascension by non-white groups. Throughout the article, she seems to suggest that any collective "ranking" automatically incorporates some moral characterization. I won't deign to respond to this risible assertion as no one ever claims Ivy Leaguers have more moral value than state schoolers or that American Idol finalists are morally superior to your local church singer. Rankings of merit imply nothing but the mere facts of nature.

Painter points out, but without adequate discussion, that the adoration of whiteness became particularly problematic for women, as pale blue-eyed blondes became, like so many unattainable desires, a reminder of what was second-class about the rest of us.

So being "pale, blue-eyed, and blonde" is "unattainable"? I beg to differ. What she really means: it's "unattainable" in the sense that not everyone can have it and thus beauty doesn't conform to the egalitarian paradigm. She finishes by asking:

Also missing from the book is an analysis of the all-important question: Who benefits and how from the imprimatur of whiteness? Political elites and employers of low-wage labor, to choose just two groups, actively policed the boundaries of whiteness.

Ahh, the white privilege argument. As evidenced by this article and the academic and political framework in which it resides, a political elite that panders to whiteness is surely a vestige of our country's past. As she alludes with this statement, "[w]hiteness thus became a method of stigmatizing dissenting ideas, a marker of ideological respectability", whiteness used to represent a desirable category, as only groups such as radical, anti-Gentile Jews and non-assimilationist Italians shirked such a classification. But now, with the advent of a multicultural doctrine, whiteness has become a mark of emptiness ("Matt Wray..."), a delineation devoid of cultural richness, as if Western Civilization has nothing to offer its progeny. "Whiteness" has become synonymous with social awkwardness and jingoism instead of a WASP elite, technological proficiency, or a rich history. How far we've come indeed.