Dr. Nell Irvin Painter - "The History of White People"

good evening i'm jonathan jadakian the spencel wilson chair in the humanities here at rhodes college as such i have the pleasure of welcoming all of you tonight i'm the coordinator for the communities and conversation series here and tonight especially i am welcoming you in from the cold i hope that we will be drawing close to the warmth the heat and the light of dr nell irvin painter's address tonight on the history of white people at a campus that is post yik yak host ferguson post post racial we need this light to reflect on our own present and our past where the ideas about whiteness and american-ness about which dr painter will be speaking how they have played their part nationally and we hope that we will be translating this in a series of conversations to our own campus as we get started this evening i need to make to give thanks to give thanks and praises because to make events like the 40 students who listen to dr painter discuss her work over lunch this afternoon and to make evenings like tonight happen it takes a village and i want to thank some of the folks in our village who made tonight possible russ wigginson in external affairs milton moreland in academic affairs meredith davis in multicultural affairs carol casey in student affairs and tim heubner the chair of the department of history i simply could not stay calm and clear without the help of jackie baker suhad altayesh and brianna summers who work on all these cic events and i want to say a very special thank you to the rhodes lecture board who make the communities and conversation series possible with their support i guess i will also want to say thank you to whosever cell phone went off because it's a good reminder if you would please put your phones on silent the next communities in conversation event is with internationally renowned mathematician and physicist brian greene on march 5th at 6 pm in this room titled the cosmos from the big bang to the end of time and if you know about brian green you know this is not an event to be missed if you don't know about grind brian greene i'm telling you this is not an event to be missed and if you don't know who brian greene is then i suggest that you like us on facebook follow us on twitter and instagram where we will let you know not only about our events but give you plenty of background so that you come to them informed speaking of social media i want to encourage the twitterrati to tweet about tonight's lecture under hashtag white people there's going to be a series of post reflections following this for students the bsa black student association is hosting a post-lecture reflection session tonight at 8 00 pm in fja a so join them for that we're also partnering with common ground with this event thanks to rasheda watkins and founder wendy thomas who's here common ground are not only hosting a conversation after this lecture community members have already signed up for that conversation but students can sign up to have a deeper personal conversation about race and whiteness on february 24th and february 25th in buckman 220 from 6 30 to 8 pm there is limited space for these conversations in order to participate you need to please send an email to dean meredith davis her email address is davism roads.edu for faculty we have we still have space in the tasty conversation we're hosting this sunday please join us for brunch from 12 to 2 in king hole that event is going to be kicked off with reflections on dr painter's book by jeff bakewell hannah barker and rebecca tubel please let jackie baker know that you are interested in joining us for that that's baker j rhodes dot edu now without further ado let me turn this over to my partner in crime for tonight's event dr charles mckinney director of the africana studies program who will introduce professor now painter good evening good evening you know how we roll so um just really quickly it can go one of two ways when you sit down in an airplane and open up a book titled the history of white people far and away the best thing there's lots of great things about this book but far and away one of the best things is sitting down in public spaces and opening up a book called the history of white people i gotta say it's a refreshing change to all of the material and all of the resources that have been written dedicated to non-white people it's great to see what happens and so i'm on the plane flying to ohio open up the book guy next to me says what are you reading well i'm reading the history of white people and he says oh can i see that still don't know what's going to happen but i say sure i hand in my copy right getting ready to hit the little button in case he gets you know in case this goes off the rails right and he starts thumbing through it and he starts to read it and um that makes sense right because this book is lyrical it is accessible and it is utterly brilliant utterly brilliant and that's a high wire act that not many of us in any discipline right get to accomplish all right lyrical accessible and brilliant it's a little bit like when you see great acting and you look and you say oh man it looks so effortless when so and so does that or when so and so does that that's not a point it's not effortlessness it's craft right it's practice it's habit it's expertise right and that's what nell irvine painter brings to this book and so much of her work in this book in particular history the history of white people it's an essential reading for our time right for us as a campus for us as a nation um it's an essential it's an essential book and so as he's thumbing through this book and he sees the lyricism and the accessibility and he bumps into the brilliance he turns and says okay who wrote this and uh you know i tell him it's neller painter well who is that well let me tell you what i should have what i could have told him right she's a leading historian of the united states she is the edwards professor of american history emeritus from princeton university in addition to her earned doctorate in history from harvard university she has received honorary doctorates from wesleyan dartmouth suny new paltz and yale she is a fellow of the american academy of arts and sciences and has also held fellowships from the guggenheim foundation the national down for the humanities the american council of learning societies in the american antiquarian society she has served as president of both the organization of american historians and the southern historical association those presidential addresses have been published in the journal of american history and in the journal of southern history the city of boston declared thursday october 4th 2007 nell irvin painter day in honor of her outstanding book award from the gustavus myers center in 2006. she's a prolific and award-winning author and this is one of her more recent books the history of white people and so tonight this is a gift right this lecture this conversation this dialogue that's going to be kicked off tonight it's going to be it's going to be kicked off by literally one of the great historians in any field in the latter part of the 20th century so please join me in welcoming dr nell irvin painter thank you so much that is the best introduction ever um people have told me in bits and pieces uh how people around them have responded to just the cover of the book actually which is a little audacious you have to before i said about well i should give you the title can a black scholar write about white people let's take a vote vote if you wait wait wait wait your choices are a black scholar cannot write about white people and a black scholar can write about white people actually i'll give you a third one can an unprepared dumb black scholar write about white people all right you ready a black scholar can not write about white people some of you are covering up an unprepared dumb black scholar can write about white people a black scholar can write about white people okay so we're some of you are not sure about any of this there are a lot of abstentions and i'm not going to hold it against you but i'm glad that you were pondering about those possibilities so before i set about answering the question in my title can a black scholar write about white people i want to thank rhodes college professors judaican and mckinney thank you rhodes college and also to the wonderful students who were at lunch today and had such terrific questions to communities in conversation and i don't know if i am strong enough to go to hashtag white people so my talk to you this evening asked the question it's actually on many minds though not always spoken out loud can a black scholar write about white people now you know that in 2010 i published a highly successful book the history of white people and many copies out there and you've seen it and so you're thinking what a dumb question of course you just did and so that takes care of the main query and i suppose we can all pack up and go home right ready to go home no okay okay i'll talk a little more so to uh to capture the true complexity of the question i need to attach some further uh corollaries one can anyone write about white people two can a black scholar write about black people as individuals and three can we get to a place in which racial identity is not the main thing we need to know about an author now in the first question can anyone write about white people i don't mean to write about writing as though people are simply assumed to be white an unstated default assumption because that's just about everything you see in just about everything you read i mean white people as white people not just people can anyone write about white people as raced just as black people are raised and therein lies the rug and that is an act that goes against much in the american grain because whiteness is supposed to be invisible normal not raced not even classed because those are somebody else's problems white means middle class hard-working honest upstanding except when it's not and it makes a lot of money as a movie white people are the american normal with traits so normal as to be invisible the opposites of those excellent traits are assumed to belong to black people the taken for granted image of black people embodies the traits associated with poverty such as ugliness sloth crime dirt illegitimacy and bad child rearing in general now as i'm saying this i'm thinking about popular culture which has plenty of people with those bad traits who are white people however those are individual failings in those cases not racial failings now in the aftermath of a series of horrific killings of unarmed black men and children victims of police brutality we are starting to recognize that one right privilege is the white privilege of not being murdered for walking around in a hoodie carrying skittles being overweight or waving around a toy gun or selling loose cigarettes when you have asthma now one change i've noticed uh since ferguson since last summer is increasing numbers of white people are aware of white privilege this to my experience is something quite new for large numbers of white people this is a new awareness and maybe now our conversation on race as we say can overcome its main stumbling block over and over and over again black and white people will get together and so the black people will start talking about the bad things that happen to them as racial discrimination and then the white people will say well i don't know why you're seeing that as discrimination because my grandparents came to this country well after slavery and they didn't come with anything and they worked hard and they succeeded and they did very well nobody gave them anything and then the conversation would totally bog down can't get anywhere after that now i'm i'm thinking that maybe the recognition of white privilege will help americans on both sides see where the experiences are not commensurate now within prevailing racial stereotypes we have to change our language if we want to depart from them so if you want to talk about white people with unlovely traits you need to attach an adjective or two such as poor or trashy if you want to talk about black people who are educated or prosperous or thrifty you need to add an adjective or two middle class educated mostly we use this language without stopping to think about it but if we thought about it we would discover that you could look for experiences of living in poverty for instance in african-american studies you could find a good deal of scholarship on issues larger than race on issues that have to do with class or being southern families in which both the wife and the husband are wage earners all of these are phenomena within african-american racial identity and they have been sort of shunted aside as knowledge that can help us understand these phenomena more broadly this class dimension within race talk the expectation that all white people are automatically middle class and genteel um that attracts many non-black people who grew up poor to black studies it's to black studies that non-black people from poor backgrounds turn to narratives that resonate with their experience so for instance stories of people who had to learn how to speak standard english who had to learn how to make social small talk who had to learn how to control their angry outbursts people who recognized the tensions between moving between the different worlds of college and home of moving between work and neighborhood of knowing both well-dressed colleagues in one of their worlds and shall be homies in another of their worlds a familiarity with both success and violent death you would find stories and scholarly analyses of all these phenomena in african-american studies but our society's emphasis on racial difference obscures commonalities across race so much in our culture would incise racial uh color lines to as deeply as possible but in our actual lived various personal experiences we know that the old neighborhood can be non-black as well as black we know the old neighborhood can be immigrant as well as native we know the colleagues crowned by success can be black as well as white we know drug overdoses carry away people of all races even though the iconography of our society paints pathology black this brings up my second question can a black scholar write about black people as just people i mean not harping on racial difference or going there first but seeing the individual specificity of african americans this is not to say that race disappears for in everyday life in a racist society you're not hearing me yeah i can hear it kind of yeah are you all right with can you not hear me there can you hear me now okay i'll start working yes this is not to say that race disappears for an everyday life in a racist society race affects quotidian experiences what i mean is that we tend to think differently about people according to race that's the definition of a racist society instead of ignoring race i mean seeing commonality as well as difference seeing what we share as well as what sets us apart i don't mean pretending that there's no such thing as black history or the black diaspora or even black movie stars and celebrities and a president re-elected to a second term these things are all real and they're important but they're not all there is to individual experience what i do mean is not starting and stopping with racial difference and it can be done as i have shown for instance in my biography sedona truth a life a symbol it's a biography that contrasts the racial symbol of suderner truth and that symbol makes her a kind of southern ex-slave speaking southern when in fact the life she actually lived she was from the catskills in new york state in answer to my third question can we get to a place in which racial identity is not the main thing we need to know about an author and here i want to share something of my experience in writing the history of white people and i mentioned part of this at lunch so those of you who own and have read the book know that it's long and it's scholarly with hundreds of endnotes in three languages the book took 10 years to research and write and is dedicated to the princeton university library this is a book of scholarship that i believe should be judged according to the soundness of its scholarship and the grace of its prose thank you professor mckinney similarly the classes i offered at princeton should be judged according to intellectual standards but when i started my research in the early 2000s those were not the questions confronting my students as they traveled back and forth between princeton and home let me speak to the professors for a second because i think you also probably teach the books that you're working on yes yes yeah so i taught the history of white people at princeton twice as an undergraduate class and once as a graduate seminar and for students i assume that rhodes students probably treat the books your professors assign as princeton students do you carry them around with you and you take them home to read over break away from campus or on the airplane you may discover that the cover of your book can raise eyebrows from the very first undergraduate class my students would return from break with stories of their family's questions about this popular class parents especially asked more urgently about my race as the professor than the content of what the students were reading and discussing early on it seemed as though the racial identity of the professor determined parental estimation of the class in the early days too i would get similar responses from people who were curious about what i was working on and said what are you working on now and i'd say no the history of white people in the beginning i could practically make a taxonomy of responses the thought that an african-american author would be writing about white people after the long long history of white peeing people saying whatever they wanted to about black people absolutely delighted african-americans it also delighted non-black people on the left who considered themselves allies of black people and they were pleased for the same reason people with european immigration and their family backgrounds would remember stories of categorization stories of grandparents who considered themselves jews or italians or irish and who thought of themselves as white but who also remembered being abused by other white people over religion or geographical origin a lot of my questioners said they were looking very much forward to reading my book but in those early days of the 21st century several white people on hearing my topic would draw back from me and ask if i were writing as a black person meaning i suppose was i going to get back at them for all the terrible things that white people had done to others at first i'd pull myself up and insist i'm writing as a historian and then i got tired of that and i said what are my options by about 2005 i was just ready to retort i'm writing as a white man but people stopped asking me so that question stopped coming and the skeptics stopped expecting my book to work as a cudgel and started expressing curiosity as to what i would find now i understand that some of the reviews on amazon or the history of white people can be pretty tough even now and they accuse me of writing revenge history so i don't read those reviews if you've read them don't tell me i don't want to know the book's reception has pleased me greatly the new york times book review gave it a long positive front page review and my book landed on the new york times book review bestseller list and you should have a little circle on your book saying new york times bestseller if you don't write it on there i was invited to the colbert report the link is on my website nellpader.com and stephen colbert and i aren't wrestled about whether there was a biological difference between catholic irish and scots-irish he said yes i said no it was a draw i gave lots of interviews and i appeared on the national book festival on the mall in washington and the miami book fair the book tour disrupted my first year of graduate study at the rhode island school of design but it was a resounding vote of confidence for a positive answer to the question we started with can a black scholar write about white people clearly the answer is yes my book came out in 2010 march 2010 some five years ago and my audience says well my american audiences i should say taught me three things that i want to share with you the first has to do with the us census the second regards a common misperception about the number of white races and this perception this misperception endures even for people who have read the book the third concerns the common american equation of race with black people so the history of white people came out in a census year and the census was on the minds of many uh in my audiences the older among you may remember a minor brouhaha over president obama's marking the black box on a census return remember that yeah but the questions i got about the census didn't come from people who identified themselves as african-american or black it came from people who reckon they should check the white box but they felt squeamish about it i would listen to their concerns which were ethnic historical political and i formulated an answer because i heard that question over and over again i said you should check the black box because we need more black people so you like that so the second issue has to do with the number of white races if you've read my book the fundamental lesson is things change since the middle of the 18th century when scientists invented human races and started classifying them the numbers of races even the numbers of the white or european races those numbers have constantly changed and even if you look at one moment say 1800 you would have a choice of how many races there were or how many white or european races so for instance one of the key figures in my book john friedrich blumenbach in his book says how many how many races are there you can you can take your pick some people say they're seven some people say they're sick some people say they're five and i know somebody who says they're two what are the two ugly and beautiful he was german and so of course the beautiful ones are german and the ugly ones are what he called mongolians and actually this uh this pairing of ugly and beautiful even though it's not on the surface of most taxonomy of race lies just underneath just underneath so the best people are not only the smartest they're also the prettiest and also how you decide who's what depends on where you are so germans between the the saxons and the anglo-saxons and the slobs tend to pay more attention to slobs than the english or the americans americans generally overlook slobs but that's because that is not a salient category in american history it is in german history and so that figures in the taxonomy that comes out of germany so from uh so scientists have never agreed on the number of races or the number of white or european races they have also never agreed on how you decide what do you measure some people say you measure this some people say you measured this usually it's heads often skulls but often heads do you measure the relationship between talks the germans uh in uh are really the pioneers of racial science and so they tended to like tall and slender so that's something that got tallied up often but there was never agreement on what to measure to decide how many races so from the 18th century until well into the 20th century racial science and ordinary people recognized more than one white race more in the mid 19th century catholic irish were considered white adult men could vote the vote profoundly shaped the experience of irish immigrants and their descendants in the united states the vote is of crucial importance and until 1920 voters had to be male as well as white but during the 19th century as irishmen were voting as white men they were also thought of as members of an inferior white race the celtic the superior white race was called saxon anglo-saxon or teutonic depending on whom you asked but the celts were considered an inferior race an inferior white race in the early 20th century eastern european hebrews as it was said were classified as separate inferior but white races slavs were said to belong to an inferior white race as were northern italians and southern italians two battalion white races they might be dingy white but they were considered white then around the first world war things changed irish people were elevated into a new classification called nordic invented around the time of the first world war and nordic included people in western europe which included the irish the prevailing notion of one big white race with no internal distinctions is a product of anthropologists in the mid 20th century then german national socialism's murderous anti-semitism prompted the departure from classifying many white races into just one you could say that the nazis unified the many white races into one in the anthropological orthodoxy that gained credence in the 1940s there were only three real human races caucasoid and negroid in that order and you could tell by the oid on the end that it was scientific in the 1970s the term ethnic superseded race for for various white groups so then there were thought to be many white ethnicities within one unified white race and you're thinking well what's the difference between an ethnicity and a race you're thinking that depends on who you ask if you look in the dictionary you look under race you'll see various races races heights color so forth also a synonym is ethnicity if you look under ethnicity then you find geography culture synonym for race this is not helpful so we think in the shadow of that classification of many white ethnicities within one unified white race now that classification is under considerable stress in the united states and that stress comes from two directions mainly the first stress on american racial classification is the category hispanics latinos who famously can be of any race latinos bedeviled taxonomists by often by too often checking some other race besides those listed in the 2010 u.s census respondents had to pick both a racial category and this could be multiple you could be black you could be white you could be asian pacific uh and they're mixed up between what we consider as race and what we consider as geography but that's that's the nature of the classification beast so you pick the race and then in addition you picked an ethnicity how many ethnicities were there were there eight seven six five four three two two how many two two yes and what were they hispanic non-hispanic so you had to make two choices were you a black person who was hispanic or non-hispanic were you a white person who was hispanic or non-hispanic but you could also be more than one race so you could be an hispanic who was both black and white or you could be a hispanic who was black and white and some other race and you could write in the race however the census wouldn't necessarily tally you up according to what you wrote so if you had written german as your ethnicity they would tell you as white so don't think you can get away with that so um it's the hit the census is not a scientific classification it's it's a political classification it tallies up americans according to what we need to know as a federal government at this moment so the categories have changed over time and they continue to change somebody told me the other day that you can get more than one ethnicity uh in 2020. we'll we'll see how that goes so taxonomical nightmare the second stress the first being hispanics latino the second stress also comes from immigration this time from people of african descent now back in the 20th century virtually all black americans were native born of native parents native grandparents native great-grandparents what was our ethnicity negro but now not only has caribbean immigration altered the cultural landscape of states like new jersey new york and florida people from africa are also here in visible numbers in the late 1990s the number of voluntary voluntary immigrants from countries in africa surpassed more than half a million so that for the first time in american history africans who wanted to leave home for north america numbered more than those in the forced migration that crested in the 18th century and many of those african immigrants are very well educated soon the census will need ethnicities within the black category i want to close with an observation arising from discussions around my book which i remind you is the history of white people my observation concerns the common american equation of race with black people or perhaps i should say americans fascination with black people though my book devotes hundreds of pages to constructions of white racial identity in question and answer sessions following my talks questioners would invariably ask about black people even though i had spoken about the long-standing slave trade from eastern europe into the mediterranean questioners would want to ask about the atlantic slave trade in racial terms as though slavery could only be a concern of africans and people of african descent now i maintain that slave trades anywhere whether around the black sea or the atlantic ocean should be analyzed as business history not race history questioners of a stereotypical mindset would want to know about black crime and in 2010 everybody wanted to talk about president barack obama i conclude that for many americans black people are much more interesting than other people i want to leave you with two things i know now first black scholars can write about anybody as long as they do their scholarly homework anybody can write about anybody as long as they do their scholarly homework and second things change the ways we think about race or even to think of race as a useful category those things also change thank you yes professor mckinney would you please recognize questioners because we're doing a q a yes please yes hi uh my name is bob ferry i'm a professor of pediatrics uh here in memphis and i've spent the last 15 years trying to improve lives for kids across a spectrum of skin views and economic situations and when you smoke i'm reminded of a colleague of mine melamed at cedars-sinai who is as they say wine is in driven he's jewish but he always checks the african-american box even though he's white but he's afraid and he points out the irony that when he does that people look at him as surprised because the color doesn't match the box um you know i'm not a big fan of labels and yet that's what we do in america we try to put a layla because a rose by any other name but still needs a name and yet in the work that i've done as a scholar i find these labels not very helpful the the divisions that affect the kids that i you know take care of are more affected by economics um there is some genetic contribution for some of their diseases but with the admixture of races it's very honestly very meaningless for me to put a label on someone and even when i look at genes uh i find that that's pretty messy too so from a career in history and labels um and you talk about things changing what is constant love doesn't change that has meaning everything changes as you know about genes we think of genes as sort of these little frozen things but as you say genes are about expressing and not expressing and how they interact with the environment so or even the plaques that are supposed to be markers of alzheimer's a lot of people die with plaques and they don't have alzheimer's so biology is not what biology is not determination i'm agreeing with you now um as far as the use of uh racial classification many people feel that intellectually and i think you're saying this that it's it's kind of meaningless but it turns out that the people who want to do away with racial classification are the people who want to do away with what's left of affirmative action or uh any kind of understanding of the history of racism in the united states the people who want to hold on to racist racial classification are people who want to try to address historic injuries so it's a it's kind of strange that what we think of people we think of as liberals should be holding on to racial classification but that's how it happens because racial classification is the way we address class distinctions or class injuries in our society so often race is a proxy for class in britain people have really gut feelings about people's class and americans say well why are you getting so upset about people of different class in that society class has got meaning in our society race has gut meaning whereas class less so if i ran the world we would know about people's family wealth and income because i do think that's the way to bring an ethical side to our policy decisions but don't hold your breath on that hello hello uh i just have a question about um my name is cameron maxwell i'm a freshman here at rhodes college and i just have a question my question is do you think that black culture will ever be integrated into mainstream society as other white cultures have been integrated into mainstream society in america yes already has been long ago but i think your question may be more about respecting those contributions and that is another issue and i think that is happening it could happen more it definitely could happen more but from the very beginning of even before the united states was the united states there was a healthy admixture of african cultures especially in what we think of as the american south so rice for instance rice cultivation and then the parts of of american culture that have to do with music very heavy inflection from african immigrants so it's been there for a long time do we give it the respect it deserves i'm going to be an optimist and say yeah that's going to happen thank you with regard to some scholarship that i'm working on from a local scholar who conflated black english as something that was uh dangerous during the 1960s because of the association with race and and the negative connotations that were possible uh she was pretty pretty much ahead of her time in the way that she thought about this she was like the nil urban painter of the uh 60s so anyway there was a nel irvine painter in the sixth about the black identity politics of the 60s and dr williams's completion with a standard english to uh to to danger in terms of being black and uh and and you know the old idea of standard english the binary between black english and standard english well those of you who are from the south know that there is not one standard english and english language is inflected by region so professor mckinney and i who are from the great state of california speak a better english than you uh during the 1990s there was a brouhaha about uh ebonics and about weather and this actually happened in oakland my hometown of oakland whether students who spoke black english should learn english standard english as a second language and it was it started as a question about linguistics and i thought that was a really good question and that would be the way to teach uh people who who had a first language a second language made a lot of sense to me actually without stigmatizing the first language because people who come uh come to the memphis schools and speak korean learn english as a second language that but that got picked up that story with you know all kinds of ridicule really very cruel and uh i don't know what happened but i think it just got laughed out without people really really taking seriously the pedagogical questions involved yes in the back hello my question for you is how much do you think stories that we consume um you know like through hollywood or through books or computer games how much do you think they are impacting the way we distinguish bracelet from one another because i as a gamer the biggest thing the biggest stories i consume are video games and what really upsets me is that the default protagonists in these scenarios are a white male and i know i can only count on my hand how many times i have played as a non-white protagonist uh well you're asking about a world in which i do not operate but i have read stories in the new york times about the misogyny of gaming culture so i would guess that the answer is organize and protest that's a good answer for just about anything so as you said um things change and given that i'm wondering i know you're historian but i'm wondering if you have any anticipations or predictions about how whiteness might change in the future if it will have any expansions or contractions like it has had in the past decades well uh as i said at lunch whatever succe whatever comes after race will be worse because things always get worse that's just a fact of life things go from bad to worse uh so um but as far uh in history of white people i talked about four enlargements of american whiteness or americanness as whiteness and the last one we're in the midst of in which light-skinned people uh who are cute or rich or powerful move in our society as if they were white until the cops shoot them uh but uh so there's been an opening up i said in the book uh whiteness isn't what it used to be the barrier losing the laws made a big difference the legal barriers uh but what i would say is it's more becoming a category not so much of whiteness but of non-blackness so it's as if as a society we need blackness to deal with maybe to deal with the poor and the the injuries of class we talk about them as black i live in newark new jersey and newark new jersey functions as a kind of black spot in a way and people say oh my god you live in newark must still be smoking from the riots um but uh and there's a there's a set of stereotypes around blackness and actually the the recent cases in which uh policemen shot and killed unarmed black men in the you know like i thought he was he was a monster uh and uh trayvon martin he was he looked like he was going to kill me or you know this sort of fear that kind of stereotype is enduring now i don't know if we'll ever get past it because it does work in our society that a lot of people need a lot of americans need where is the tipping point i don't know what has happened in the past is that another group will take the place and then they'll get them done so i don't know i think that race though is often what charles blow in the new york times called a weaponized concept and it's used to divide people when you mention race you talk about difference and i think in this terrible moment that we're in we need to do as much as we can to figure out answers to the problems we share i i was sitting with a uh where are we put your hand up stand up against in the of why people buy products in china et cetera and he sensed me that there was a movement within the business zoning communities in europe and north america to start moving industries into africa because of the labor pool um and a lot of people are aware of massive slavery footprint that still exists and i'm one i'm wondering what your thoughts are on the economics of that and how majority might governments divide these nation's states to keep them as a part of that you know you've asked a question that i do not have a useful answer to i really don't hi uh my name is zod cullen i'm a freshman earlier you mentioned affirmative action and that's something i've heard referred to as like reverse racism i was wondering what you thought about that and if you thought that quote unquote backwards racism was a good thing or like if it had any positive effects or over sentence balance well i will tell you i will answer personally here my first i have a phd from harvard my first job was at the university of pennsylvania and i would not have gotten that job without affirmative action and you're saying well why you were qualified it turns out that without affirmative action lots of employers never think to employ a woman or a person of color or a black person it's not an accident that your faculty now looks different from your faculty in the 1950s and that difference is affirmative action affirmative action is not about going out in the street and employing the first black person you think to do something it's about reminding people that the people who are qualified to do various kinds of jobs come in different bodies so affirmative action in the united states since the 1970s has not been about quotas quotas were outlawed by the supreme court in the bakke decision in the 1970s 72 73 74 around it can always turn to historians for precision right we're pretty sure it was in the 70s and since then the supreme court has whittled it down to uh kind of it's good for diversity that's all that's left but that is more than nothing i um i'll tell you how old i am i graduated from the university of california berkeley in 1965. right so in those days in the old no 64. sorry 64. so in those days um all of us were admitted all of us who were black were admitted to the university of california berkeley in exactly the same way as any but there was no such thing as i am a pre-affirmative action baby so but even though i had gotten in just like anybody else it was so clear to me that my fellow students and many thank god not all of my professors assumed that i was dumb and that i would be a failure because i am black it was just you could it's almost as if they had little printouts on their foreheads uh thank kevin i had some other faculty members and i had some friends you know you make a society around you and i got through my first job was at penn and i remember being at a swimming pool with other faculty members i think they were actually passing around and joined but one of my colleagues said to me how does it feel to know you only got your job because you're black i was floored i thought i always thought i was the smartest person in the womb and i probably didn't have a good comeback but i do remember i actually wrote a column in the new york times in 1980 about this you can look it up in the hers column and people say i must be on easy street and it was a response not to that guy but to somebody else who i was sharing you know how you're sitting in the train and somebody talks to you and so this man this white man was sitting on the train next to me and he says you know who are you what do you do i said i'm an assistant professor at penn and he said i tried to get a job at penn like i had taken his job and so you know it turned out i had a phd from harvard and he had a phd from podunk but that didn't make any difference it didn't make any difference so if we have gotten i mean there are a lot of reasons why your faculty looks different now than it did before affirmative action there are a lot of reasons but one of those reasons is affirmative action see we have okay then there's some people over here too yes um my name is julia um and thank you for coming down to speak with us um i was really struck by what you said early on about the growing perception that maybe white privilege was more accepted now and i wondered what maybe history has to teach us are there periods that you feel like that has been true in the past and what might that um i think that um it's kind of like when people ask about obama and you know the first election in 2008 what does that say about how we've improved and i think that's the answer to the question about numbers of people waking up or seeing white privilege we've been through this question about police brutality before as i told you earlier i'm from oakland my claim to fame is i went to the same high school with huey newton we were in the same high school class and i will tell you also that huey newton was always very good-looking and we were tracked so you know we were in different tracks a big big urban high school but i knew who he was because a he was really good-looking and b he always wore a suit to high school anyway that's so you know the black panthers rose in response to police brutality so it's like we're slammed back into 1964 1965 1966 and if anybody wants the fastest way to gun control get the get bobby seal and them to take their guns and march on sacramento that's how we got gun control in california yes yes so we've been through this before and when we and then there there were there were the there was the urban unrest 65 66 67 the assassinations of 63 and 68 and and americans said wait a minute where are we and they started talking about race and race differences but stumbling over white privilege so he didn't get very far but a lot of things changed so desegregation the desegregation of higher education people working together all these things changed the complexion of of american society so for instance some years ago my husband and i spent a sabbatical in germany and one of the ways that that german popular culture would signal that a scene was taking place in the united states is that it would have black people in it that was the marker of american culture so that couldn't have happened say in the 50s you wouldn't see that so things have changed and um the ability of white people to see white privilege is a massive change a massive change i don't know how many people were talking about but just you know i i don't read in a scientific way you know i read the new york times i read the new yorker and stuff that comes up on my facebook page but it seems to me that we're in a different situation and uh i said at noon that i i was struck by how many people had crawled out from under rocks to throw those rocks at the president and i think a lot of the opposition to the president is based on the simple fact that he's a black man and those people had kind of stayed under their rocks before then so all these things are happening at once it's an interesting time hi hello my name is about white people when i was growing up one of the things that was frustrating about education was that history seemed to be all right everything created everything made and one of the adjectives that i don't know that meant white to me was for instance classical music immediately you know sends you to looking across in europe and each other um and so we talk about literature we generally think about wideness and degree classes and etc and so you're pointing out that greek and roman culture did not necessarily classify themselves as white but i also think about the whole hellenistic movement and the superiority of greek culture and i wanted to know if you saw any historical threat between well yes absolutely absolutely and uh this well you answered your own question actually the idea that the ancient greeks well the idea around the late 19th and early 20th centuries not that they were white people is that they were saxons they were teutonic they were blondes and if you you must you must have read uh the history of white people uh already maybe you read some other book that had same things in it i don't know but one of the images is of a series of murals in the boston art museum in which not only are the ancient greeks blondes the horses are blondes so yes it was a historical moment late 19th early 20th century making them not just blots but also two tons hi my name is jonathan and i'm a rhodes graduate class of 2012. and i just want to say thank you so much for every word that's come out this here really seriously incredible um you responded to a question by saying that in so many words that it's only going to get worse and that's not very reassuring and so do you have any other words of advice well when i say things always get worse that's a global sense and if you had asked me about anything i would have said that things always just get worse that's you know it's like every day i don't know if you all read the newspapers you're too young for that but in the olden days when we used to read newspapers i mean my husband and i we still read newspapers sometimes you read them online but we still read newspapers every day you read the newspapers oh my god but we're still here even though every day awful things happen and even things that you thought shouldn't happen anymore are happening again things do terrible things happen every day but we're still here so you know you can go back and read the newspapers from 2013 as terrible things happening we're still here go back and read the newspapers from 2008 terrible things happening we're still here so i guess the good part is we're still here and as for words of advice do your work sure yeah very clearly um race is part racism is part of culture and culture is learned we get we grow up we you know the process of civilization we that is to say we get made into little integers in our civilization whatever it is and if it's a racist society in which people get catara categorized first and foremost and last racially then it's a racist society that we get civilized into so yes it's learned it's not like it used to be oh there's something hopeful it's not like it used to be so for instance um the students were asking about mixed race and we're talking about passing literature and so forth so in the olden days if you were a beautiful white woman with beautiful long golden hair and bright blue eyes and you were gorgeous and young but you had a white great grandmother a black great-grandmother it would ruin you for life terrible secret and people wrote books about this it's not like that anymore i'm sure this makes you feel better with your long blonde hair in your eyes so things have loosened up things have loosened up some other things count besides your race and uh it i think it is not comforting to very young people to hear it used to be much worse in the olden days that's probably not comforting because you probably get really tired dealing with race and you know all the stuff that goes with it so my advice to you i'll give you two pieces of advice because i know you're tired one is take vacations and two leave the country you said earlier that now white people are starting to acknowledge that they do have white privilege so with that understanding um you know personally i don't think that i have a person on the level that i do not me i say that all of us should i mean all of us being black white and everything could maybe take this assignment for what five years five years ten years and then quit so you do it for five years or ten years and then quit all right with that two quick things two quick things um one professor painter will be outside to sign copies of her book the history of white people again take it with you it's really great um and the second thing second announcement is for all the folks who are here for common ground if you could move forward move to the front of the stage so you all can convene up here that would be great greatly appreciated once again let's give thanks you

Channel: Rhodes College

Views: 694,534

Keywords: Neil Irvin Painter, Rhodes College, Communities in Conversation

Id: LiYiMi_tEe8

Length: 81min 15sec (4875 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 16 2015