SO WHAT ABOUT THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE?

 

 

Every February, the Emeritus College invites one of its Lunch Colloquium presenters to address a topic that will allow us to celebrate February's designation as Black History Month, and this February was no exception, although you might have wondered about that when you noted our presenter was to be a white person speaking about "The History of White People." Of course, those who attended the Colloquium in question on February 15 soon learned that Professor of Dermatology Emerita, Marilynne McKay, had been inspired to research the subject and compose the presentation by a book of the same title, a scholarly study in which Nell Irvin Painter, an African-American Princeton historian and award-winning author of books on black Americans, took on the topic of "whiteness" and the concept of "race."

As a dermatologist, Marilynne introduced her subject by taking us "skin deep" to discuss the structure and function of pigmentation (especially with regard to ultraviolet light and our need for skin-regulated vitamins and sun protection).  But she soon moved on to proffer material allowing us to consider what it means when people look different in different places--as it would seem they have done since people first evolved and began to circulate about the world--whether of their own free will or, increasingly as time went by, the will of others who'd captured and/or enslaved them--with centuries of subsequent reproductive interactions resulting in children with a variety of pigmentary shades and (as we're now finding) shared genetic variations that make it very difficult to say any one group is really biologically different from another.

With a wonderful collection of slides she had gathered from many sources, Marilynne took us through three millennia of nomadic traffic to demonstrate that the myth of "racial purity"--from the beginning of human time--was just that: mythic (particularly around the Caucasus Mountains). As we all know, through the ages there's been plenty of "ethnocentrism" leading to prejudice and discrimination among groups of people. Although there have been many claims that one race was somehow superior to others, today most biologists and anthropologists agree that differences exist, but a biogenetic hierarchy of human races cannot be proven.

In the final portion of the presentation, Marilynne turned to the subject of "whiteness" as a legal definition dating back to colonial America. Designations of supposed superiority such as "British" and "Christian" and "freeborn," gradually gave way to "white," a designation based on "a permanent phenotypic marker" (like "negro" or "black") in the course of the 18^th century.  By the middle of that century, "white" had become more or less synonymous with European origin--and soon thereafter, non-European Indians were labeled and dismissed as "redskins." Of course, things got complicated in the later 1800s and beyond as sequential waves of immigrants began to arrive among us, many of them whites from Europe, and yet not (supposedly not) acceptable as members of the American white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite. Irish Catholics? Horrors. And more and more Italians? And this is not to mention the eventual influxes of people of Asian origin-brown and yellow people!  Again, horrors. And to the extent that such immigrants were slow--or reluctant--to adopt American culture, they were often characterized as "worse than Blacks."

Things did begin to change during and after the Great Depression. Policies and programs in the 1930s promoted "cultural pluralism," and World War II did much to encourage integration of all our peoples (in spite of such overt segregation as the internment of Japanese-Americans here at home and the separation of African-Americans from other servicemen). In the decades post-war, citizenship rights and civil rights (including voting rights) were extended (with major legislation that we all remember from our younger years). And immigration law evolved to allow more arrivals from more areas of the world--even if those entering came from the "tired," and "poor," and "huddled masses," without white skin or white forebears. 

"White Privilege"--to enjoy certain entitlements and liberties as a result of one's status, not necessarily one's efforts--is alive and well in the USA. We're still talking about immigrants, and presidential candidates are arguing that we should build walls and blow out the "lamp beside the golden door." And we're still debating how to deal with those who are perceived as "other" here at home--typically those who are other than white and clearly without privilege. It would seem we have yet to accept the consequences of ignorance that enable those who still believe in the supposed hierarchy of races--with white at the top, the whiter the better--to set the standards for education and political action for those members of society living lives that are not considered to matter . . . as much.

--Gretchen Schulz (feeling testy as she writes because she's listening to yet another Republican debate)