![]() ![]() ![]() Painter points out that “for most of the past centuries…educated Americans firmly believed in the existence of more than one European race.” She explains that this view legitimized the rule of elites by attributing the inferior social position of slaves and workers to a perceived racial inferiority. What emerges from this is a convincing argument that race, far from being a permanent scheme of categorizing human beings, is a social construct, a relatively recent development that has changed over time. ![]() Painter, who has written several books on African American history, focuses here on whites, as they are often defined as “the leavings of what is not black,” and much of what has been written on white races has fallen into obscurity. Nell Irvin Painter begins The History of White People declaring that “because race is an idea, not a fact…its questions demand answers from the conceptual rather than the factual realm.” In the just under 400 pages that follow, Painter recounts more than 2,500 years, from the ancient Greeks through today, of examples of thinking on peoples now thought of as white. ![]()
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