The history of white people [5/24/2010]

[Music] this is really a history of white people it's not a history of white over black it's not a history of the racial schemes that are more familiar in the American South it's really about differing constructions of white racial identity I start in antiquity because that is before the invention of race as everybody who lives in Charlottesville knows one of the great constant surprises of Charlottesville is the the wealth of really interesting people with very interesting connections and interests that we have in this community and among those is our good friend at barber who for many years we won't say how many but for many years was a senior editor at wwhen and company and through Edie barbers connections with Norton and with other publishing houses we are able to routinely attract some of the most important recent authors to come to Charlottesville so I want to recognize Edie and acknowledge his contribution and the contribution of many others in helping us attract people like today's guest thank you very much we have long understood that race is a cultural and not a genetic construct in the American South we have been especially aware of the advantages of being classified as white rather than mulatto or Negro or black or Indian racial classification for too many years determine whether you could vote whom you could marry whether you could go to a concert or enter into a restaurant to buy a hamburger and the classifications change from time to time with curious results in Virginia for example state law in 1705 classified as mulatto anyone with at least one eighth African ancestry and then in 1785 the percentage of African ancestry necessary to be determined or to be classified as non-white was raised to 1/4 so someone who in 1784 was classified as mulatto because she had one black great grandparent might in 1785 after they changed the law claim status as white and then in 1910 the General Assembly redefined black persons as having more than 1/16 of Negro blood so someone who in 1909 had all the rights and privileges of a white person in 1910 could lose those privileges then in 1924 Virginia adopted the so called one-drop rule which said that to be classified as white one must have quote no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian Nell Irvin painter has now come to help untangle all of this for us she adds immeasurably to our understanding of the fluidity of racial classification by showing us that this didn't happen just in the American South and not just since the beginning of the importation of African slaves but that it has been going on for tens of centuries and in many parts of the world dr. painter has the education and experience to tackle this ambitious project fairly described by the title of her new book the history of white people her undergraduate education was at Berkeley in anthropology with time out at the University of Bordeaux studying French medieval history she read African Studies at the University of Ghana earned a master's degree in African history at UCLA and was awarded her PhD in American history from Harvard she is now the Edwards professor of American history emeritus at Princeton professor painters the author of something over 75 articles and eight books please welcome Nell Irvin painter [Applause] good morning it's nice to see you it's nice to be here in Charlottesville what I'm going to do is start talking to you and then I'm going to show you some images and talk to you while I show you images and then I'm also going to ask you some questions I'll start by asking your questions please raise your hand if you feel you have a racial identity ok please raise your hands if you feel your parents had a racial identity that's a few more isn't dead please raise your hand if you feel grandparents had a racial identity okay that's about everybody isn't it I think I'll go home ok we'll come back to this but you're already you're already ahead of the game so maybe we'll see we'll see what happens first I want to make some clarifications for my introduction and that is that this is really a history of white people it's not a history of white over black it's not a history of the racial schemes that are more familiar in the American South it's really about differing constructions of white racial identity and I start in antiquity because that is before the invention of race race was invented as a scientific category during the Enlightenment during the 18th century and so when we read race back we're really reading back categories that did not exist in antiquity and so I start with the Greeks and the Romans to show you what they considered important which is not what we consider race so what is race it's a scientific system of classifying permanent innate biological differences between various groups of people it arose during the 18th century enlightenment when science replaced religion as a source of truth and we're seeing now that religion is returning maybe a religion never went away but certainly religion is rivaling science now as a source of truth right in our own country although race is said to be scientific there has never been agreement on the number of human races or even the criteria to be used to determine them so those have changed over time even within one person one scholar one of the long last longest lasting criteria which is skull measurement and I'll show you what I'm talking about in a moment that has lost much of its power so Americans well Americans with eyes in their heads also realized that skin color is no longer and a reliable guide to racial difference I have told you that this is not a black-white history this is not a history of the terrible things that white people have done to other people it changes it traces changing concepts of the white or European race says plural from antiquity before the beginning of the invention of the scientific concept of races right to the present time for most of the last 200 years or so race was not thought to pertain only to non-white people race talk continued right across the color line to embrace people who we consider as part of one white race and see them as different white races so white has been the the classification of white has only been part of our obsession with race and it also has not been all there was to it so within the history of the United States there never was a time when Europeans were considered non-white so it's not a question of people becoming white because it was very clear safe for purposes of voting that poor Irishmen were white people but that's not all there was to it so we'll get to get back to that but they were considered white people the races that were considered alien races in the early 20th century Jews Slavs Italians they were always considered white they just weren't the right kind of white people so I'm going to take you through brachycephalic Alpine's dalla cosa folic mediterraneans with a quick look at the jewish race so this is to tell you that the idea of one big universe unitary white race this is an idea from about the 1950s today the notion persists that people of color have race or you might say erased but that white people are not but you all very sophisticated you knew that already often if I ask people audiences like this who has a racial identity people who consider themselves non-white will put their hands up but people who consider themselves white they're not sure now this beam is since this year that helps a little bit because people have to check but sort of in everyday life the idea is I think still pretends we can talk about this some questions and answers that the people who have race are non-white and the people who don't have race the people who are individuals are people classified as white now the concept of white people has a history that's what this book is about and I want to select five pivotal moments from the forging of the identity of the American the American is an idea certainly an idea that existed in the 20th century when I was a student probably most of you are familiar with that turn of phrase are you the America and the idea of the American the American mind yes okay so until quite recently the assumption was that the American was a white male northerner not a southerner probably middle class and so I want to select five moments from that history to talk to you about the history of the concept of white people and I want to start with girding in Germany in 1795 but that is a man named Yann Friedrich blumenbach in blumenbach was the man who called white people Caucasian that's how I started writing this book people say where'd you get that idea why did you decide to write this book and I said you know I wondered why white people were called Chechens because remember in the late 20th century and the early 21st century and was all this fighting around the Caucasus and we saw images of buildings we saw images of Chechens bearded terrorists and so forth and I thought why are white American people called that and so it took me back to this figure young Friedrich blumenbach who was a professor at the University of göttingen and in 1795 he decided to call white people or the European variety as he would say Caucasian I'll come back to that the second moment is the northern us in the mid 19th century when two white races were thought to live to get well I wouldn't say live together but share the territory and those two white races were the Saxon and the Celtic and my central figure in that section is Ralph Waldo Emerson Emerson was the Saxon and on the other hand there were the Celts who were patty and Bridget and this was the moment of massive impoverished migration from Ireland the third moment is American scholarship from the first quarter of the 20th century and at this moment the idea of three European races three white races held sway and that kind of scholarship led to the curtailment of immigration from Europe or from Southern and Eastern Europe and poor immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were stigmatized as alien races based on their skull shape and their intelligence at that point the Irish were accepted into the American as Northern European Nordics the Nordic is a term from the early 20th century but the Jews Italians Slavs and Greeks were still excluded as alien races and same time eugenics stigmatized poor southern anglo-saxons as degenerate families and this is the caring buck story which had its day new mom right here in Charlottesville the fourth moment is the American political economy during and after the New Deal in the Second World War and we can kind of sum that up as the development of the suburbs so after the Second World War American governmental lending policies fostered a residential apart a that in the 1950s and 1960s ringed impoverished D industrializing cities with new all-white suburbs the children and grandchildren of the formerly alien races and degenerate families had become simply hard-working white Americans the American the fifth moment is the remaking of race in the USA in the early 21st century our own time after the end of legalized segregation and in the midst of renewed immigration heavily from Latin America immigration from Latin America Africa and the Caribbean are breaking down not only official US Census glados classifications but also bringing immigrant mobility into black identity black may still signify poor but not to the extent that it did before 2000 and as the figure of black becomes less obviously poor the figure of white becomes less obviously privileged so that's a quick scheme let's go back and look just a little more closely first goading in Germany 1795 the invention of the term clock based on a beautiful skull professor Yin Friedrich blumenbach envisioned a single but quintessentially beautiful white race stretching westwards from russia south eastwards into india and then westwards into north africa so this was a large category that was not very useful in Europe actually so it's much more likely to be found in the United States and to a certain extent in Great Britain so there's poor young Friedrich blumenbach blumenbach based his designation on the most beautiful skull in his collection now the beauty this is a beautiful skull you have to admit and part of the reason for its beauty is that it is the skull of a very young person it is a female skull and I know from the cover letter that accompanied it from Moscow to Goettingen that it was the skull of a young woman from Georgia that is Georgia between the Black Sea and the Caspian who had died suddenly of venereal disease that is to say this young woman was a sex slave and she came from the area of the world which has produced slaves from time immemorial Herodotus did not know when that trade started so this skull reminds us of sex it reminds us of femininity that reminds us of beauty and it reminds us of the age-old white slave trade so it also reminds us a bloomin box methodology which was the measurement of skulls so he was not looking at a cute chick he was looking at a skull he had a skull collection he was a scientist so the skull has remained a focal point or did remain a focal point for a hundred years the skull the head the brain iq measure it's finally 200 years the blumenbach called for only one white race a very big one this classification didn't prevail until the middle of the 20th century so let's go to the northern US in the mid 19th century and here we come to the erection of the Saxon or the anglo-saxon as the American and the Saxon is opposed to the Irish cult often people have a hard time believing about conceiving of the amount of hatred directed at Irish Catholics because it seems that real deep hard running murderous hatred can only be directed at non-white people this is not truth the Holocaust unfortunately showed us so the poor Irish of the mid 19th century were stigmatized in many ways and one was in terms of their appearance I mentioned the beauty of blumenbach skull and the idea that to be part of a superior race was to be beautiful this is hung on and in fact it still hangs on that to be desirable makes you better and to be a desirable race makes you a better race so here we have the saxon of Florence Nightingale opposed to the Celts as we see the Irish were considered Celts they were considered ugly primitive dark-skinned dark-haired a race whom the Saxons had conquered and so this iconography comes from Great Britain but it circulated in the middle of the nineteenth century in the United States so we have contrasting faces to show that the inner person is expressed with the outer appearance we have Thomas nest this comes from reconstruction the ignorant vote you see that the black the figure labeled black is clearly a a seed he's a peasant he's barefoot he has his broken little hat the figure labeled white is account this is stereotypical Irish stereotype from the hat to the ape-like face you see this over and over and over again as the characterization of the Irish and then another Nast cartoon this sums up the use that Irish men even as stigmatized as an inferior race were able to exercise in the American polity as white men as voters and here you have the Irishman his shillelagh says a vote and he's together with the former Confederate and the New York Democrat and they are trampling on the black Union veteran and the ballot box and his veterans hat are rolling beyond his reach this is called this is a white man's government the figure best known for providing the educated view of the Saxon or the American isackson is Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ralph Waldo Emerson plays a central role in my book as a beautiful Orchestrator of ideas that were circulating about white races in the United States Emerson felt that the American was a Saxon because the Englishman was a Saxon and Americans were double-distilled Englishmen so he had a view and when he said Saxon he didn't mean Saxony around Dresden or Leipzig his saxony and the saxony of anglo-saxon ists is a saxony that's kind of squished in there between the Netherlands and Denmark have any of you been there yeah you've been to Saxony yeah yeah he wrote a book published in 1856 called English traits which is his race book and if you want to know Emerson's thinking about white race it's in English traits but he gave lectures from the 1830s 40s and 50s on these topics permanent traits of English national genius for instance in the 1850s the Anglo American so for Emerson the American was essentially an Englishman who was essentially a Saxon the next moment is u.s. scholarship in the first quarter of the 19th century and this is the most influential book on the white races published in 1899 by a professor at Columbia then at Harvard this book actually got him his Harvard professorship his name was William zebra plea and this is called the races note plural of Europe this scholarship is voluminous this is simply the most quoted and the most reproduced book and this was the book that laid the groundwork for the cutting off of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe Ripley used up-to-date methodology including hundreds of images to show racial types and this also was standard in the anthropological literature of the time and he explained how he designated his European races and that was the cephalic index this was what he called the best test of race so the three races oh there's Ripley that is his Harvard professor image and it says on the bottom which you can't see here it says please return to Professor Ripley I found it in the Harvard archives so here are his three white races the first is Teutonic which is Dalek Oh cephalic that is a long head and light-coloured the second is Alpine which is Brockie cephalic which is round headed and kind of brownish and the third is Mediterranean which is again long headed but dark and he included images to show you the long head and the round tent interestingly enough both of these skulls come from the Netherlands and in case you don't wander around seeing skulls here are actual people to show you how these three different races appear in life and it's always with the Teutonic and the top and the alpine in the middle and the Mediterranean at the bottom now there was one big problem with this scheme is it didn't include Jews Jews have been a problem for right white race taxonomy from the beginning of this taxonomical history for blumenbach he wasn't sure it's the Jews in the laps they come in they go out or they erase or not are they european it's never quite clear so for Ripley he said he was very progressive in his time he said Jews are not a race and this was in a moment when it was very common to speak of the Jewish race and distinct eyes Jews and according to race he said no no Jews are not a race they are people and they look like the people around them he said plus it's not that different those of you who go around saying that there's a pronounced Jewish nose it's not that different he said you take the nostril 'ti of the Jewish nose there on figure one and you kind of pull it down a little bit and then you kind of straighten it out see this is how to make a Jew into a Roman now but this point the Saxon kilt distinction had faded because two things were going on the first is that a couple of generations had passed since the famine Irish and with the vote the Irish were able to take advantage of politics and patronage jobs and so forth and to take advantage of universal education in the north so the famine Irish of the 1840s and 50s had become the Union for men had become the teacher and so forth of the turn of the century so the the mobility built in to access worked very well and the other was that there was a new wave of immigrants a big new wave of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and the Irish got put into a new category a 20th century category it was no longer Teutonic the new category was Nordic and Irish were within Nordic the people stigmatized by race were now people from Southern and Eastern Europe they were stigmatized largely as being being stupid actually because this is the era of IQ testing and there was widespread IQ testing during the First World War so the first world war in the United States unleashed a real tide of hysteria and when I say racial hysteria I don't mean the red summer against black Americans only in addition it unleashed a racial hysteria against European immigrants and this is the moment when just a wave and maybe that's the right word wave of anti-semitism overtakes Americans so this this cartoon comes from The Saturday Evening Post the post was the most widely circulated magazine in the United States at the time was some two million subscribers it was very influential and it was rabid against the immigrants they were called sometimes the new immigrants and so this cartoon is called look out for the undertone you have a family an American family striving into the waves heedless the father is heedless he is the employer of cheap immigrant labor so he does not see the threat of immigration which is what this wave says the mother who also gaily goes into the waves behind him is a sentimentalist a sentimentalist was usually a woman but was someone who did not hate the guts of the immigrants someone who say worked in a settlement house was a social worker knew something about the immigrants and was not opposed to them and so these people were dismissed by people like Theodore Roosevelt as sentimentalist so she has no sense of the danger lurking the only one who is pulling back is the child the future of America and behind the wave you see the mortal threat and it says the wave says immigration and behind the wave are lowered standards race degeneration Bolshevism and disease and these are the threats that the alien races and this is the alien races from Europe they're not talking about black people or Indians or Asians they're talking about Europeans ambitious psychologists took advantage of the war by administering IQ tests to millions of draftees and producing scientific quantified evidence that the immigrants were stupid so the immigrants belonged to inferior races that is the Alpine and the Mediterranean and this is a page from well it's part of a page from a book by a Princeton professor published by Princeton University Press and the book is called a study of American intelligence from 1923 and it was the proportion of Nordic Alpine and Mediterranean blood in each of the European countries so with this with this table you can tell how many of which race are in various countries go down to Turkey for instance so you have Turkey unclassified which has one set of numbers they you have Turkey in Europe including Serbia Montenegro and Bulgaria and then you have Turkey in Asia I leave it to you to figure out which Turk you are dealing with so this kind of scholarship persuaded Congress to pass the most far-reaching legislation until that time by closing closing down immigration now the fourth moment is the national mobilization to confront the crises of the Great Depression and the Second World War and these crises this mobilization made into voters the children or the naturalized members who of the so called alien races and their children maybe even their grandchildren and by becoming voters they became part of the American and so you have a kind of mobilization but also a move in into the figure of the American prompted partly by the bad example of Nazi Germany but mostly also by the inclusive policies of the New Deal and the Second World War so by the mid 20th century a new racial scheme had appeared and there were said to be three real races negroid and Caucasoid in reverse order of course Caucasoid first a and negroid so these were these were the three real races and there were no sub races or different races within Caucasoid so the the people within the caucus oyd group had access to two powerful sources of wealth actually and that was the veterans mortgage guarantee program and the Federal Housing Authority these two programs made virtually all their loans to white people anybody of my age knows that well anybody african-american of my age knows that it was not possible to get an FHA loan if you were black in the 50s and 60s so the great example of suburbanization suburbanization for white people only and now this category no longer includes celts or Saxons or L Pines or Mediterraneans or two tonics or Nordics it's just white people and so in places like Levittown which remained virtually lily-white to this day there were I rescind a lien Americans and Jewish Americans altogether and so in this moment the classic of the early 20th century no longer held sway and this is the title page of my copy which I bought online the accession from the Lowell Massachusetts public library so that brings us to at the present time the early 20th century has witnessed another remaking of race in America this time toward a multiracial multicultural America that for the first time includes people of African descent in the image of the American actually we don't so much have an image of the American anymore we're more likely to have an array of Americans of different sorts this is a very different I cannot refer of our citizenry than prevailed in most of the 20th century and certainly in the 19th century and two great forces have helped work this change the first is the end of legal segregation or rather legal exclusion against Africa Americans lowering of discrimination and so those motors of mobility that were that Irish Americans and Jewish Americans and Italian Americans could use finally became accessible to african-americans in the late 20th century and on the other hand large immigration at the same time as the civil rights movement that struck down the legal barriers for African Americans the federal government remade immigration law 1965 and so since 1965 we've had a pouring of immigrants mostly who do not consider themselves white people from Latin America people from Africa people from the Caribbean and so forth and so together these two large forces are breaking down u.s. census classifications largely based on the old black/white so we have much more going on now and the two censuses the census of 2000 and the census of 2010 very quickly sum up the choices that Americans have now in terms of racial designation first of all you decide who were what you are and it's up to you and the second is that you have an array of choices and you don't have to choose just one and you also have room for other in addition today's immigrants are less likely to identify themselves as racist color so even though something like 78 percent of native-born Americans can see themselves as white only 46 percent of foreign-born Americans identified themselves as white and 23 percent identify themselves as Asian the fastest-growing proportion of the u.s. immigration population is Hispanic and as you know Latinos can be Asterix of any race so very often people Latino background will classify themselves as other or as Latino as from their countries or from a collection of different ways of seeing themselves so the increase also of interracial marriages and couplings has produced millions who see themselves as neither black nor white so one in 50 Americans and this is from 2000 we don't know what 2010 will bring 1 in 50 Americans in 2000 identifies himself or herself as multiracial these people are also overwhelmingly young so in summary race immigration and labor have long been linked in the Americas where conquest and slavery shaped the conceptual basis of nationality over and over again racial designation has served to stigmatize the poor the poorly paid the unpaid the working poor there is no question but that the idea of race an idea of permanent difference serves to keep us apart but if we look at concepts of race we see that they change over time even though the core of the idea is permanence we need to remember also that these ideas rate reach beyond black people or Asians or Native Americans into people now considered white in short white people have a history thank you [Applause] if I may start you have talked a lot about how classifications were developed but haven't really touched upon how classifications the boundaries between classifications have been policed could you give us sort of a quick overview of how we have policed these boundaries and I particularly like to know that in whether in light of the changes in the way we we take the census by giving people a choice does that mean that there's going to be less policing less enforcement of the boundaries than there has been in the past most of the policing has been most of the policing of white people I should say has been outside the law the policing against people considered black has been legal until the civil rights era of the 1960's but people responded in various ways by for instance developing something called scots-irish in the mid 19th century before the immigration of the famine Irish everybody who came from anywhere in Ireland was considered Irish but with the famine Irish the older Irish immigrants wanted to separate themselves out and so they began to call themselves scots-irish and one way you could tell was between what you spelled your Kelly with two E's or not and you could of course change your name so most of this policing of white people was on a face-to-face basis and for science however which laid the groundwork for how people thought about these groups something called a racial temperament this is an old idea that was very popular in the early 20th century and it was thought that certain races for instance the Italian were singing and dancing and so they were not up to doing hard jobs for instance one thing I remember from my years as professor is how much policing of boundaries young people do with each other and they want very much for lines to be clear and so say the girl who's a skateboarder the black kid who likes grunge music you know people who fall outside the so-called right categories can face some pretty heavy hazing from their fellow students so this is part of our society not now so much part of our legal system yes you mentioned and I was fascinated to learn that the Romans and Greeks apparently had no useful category for race races and had no useful function apparently in their societies and I just wondered with the advent of the scientific study of races what was did you get a sense for what the function of that categorization was what social function that that serve and why did that emerge at that time did it serve in fact a social function you mean was in polite living rooms or something like that not so much but in terms of the scholarship it served to make sense of the world around us because the Enlightenment is is the moment as as Europeans grapple with a much larger world than they thought they lived in and so the categories are designated to put Europeans at the top or their kind of European at the top so it's not enough to be a European you have to be a long-headed light-eyed European and every system and there were there were hundreds of systems this literature is not as big as the literature on black people as race but it's really big and everybody had their own system and everybody had their own criteria of deciding the head shape was just one of the most popular so it's really a way of saying whoever is on top now deserves to be there forever yeah thank you for your scholarship I noticed in the cartoon the post cartoon showing the wave coming out of Europe that cartoon could very easily be in a magazine today except now would be Mexico instead of Europe and things haven't changed at all things have changed I think in an important way ideologically and that is the discussion is no longer around race if we had been before say 1980 we might well be hearing about racial characteristics of Mexicans so that's a big difference your fascinating history suggests that this whole term of race is a human construct and it's been changed over over the many decades and that it's a very mushy term which would be very well served to be pushed aside if we could has there been much effort in recent times to dismiss this term get rid of it and yes address us in a different way yeah in the 1990s the psychologists and anthropologists had suggested getting rid of the term race and using ethnicity I'm not sure how much help that would be but the issue is that we people have needs systems of dealing with with human difference and so whatever you decide the salient differences you have a word for it one thing that would be useful perhaps in getting rid of race would be getting rid of the idea of permanence which is central in race but seeing what people can do with religion I'm not so sure I want to bring that one back so I I don't have an end I just want people to know that there's a history here change over time thank you I actually have a two-part question yeah one is with all of the problems with all of the slipperiness and classifications of race does race serve useful function can observe and has it served and to what extent has it served a constructive or useful purpose and the second has to do with classifications within classifications that is there are ways in which the slippery classifications of race become gendered for example yes you're talking about whites but I think for example of Parks famous assertion that the Negro is the lady of the races and so the ways in which these classifications about race also bleed into classifications of gender and and perform other hierarchical work yeah no but what's your first question do with all of its problems in its that didn't accuracy yes race or can race ever serve a constructive purpose well let's see for somebody like Emerson I think it made him feel better to see himself as a Saxon and in the black power moment black people could embrace blackness in a way that I think is very constructive and as I visit my European colleagues who worked in women's studies for instance or work in immigration studies in Britain that not having the civil rights moment and not having black power to remake to take a stigmatized identity and say we're black and we're proud not having had that forerunner has really held back say women's studies or immigration studies in Europe they're still saying oh we don't want to be good or wise you know that sort of thing like people would say in the 1970s so the moment of taking what the society can a spoiled identity and wrapping yourself in it and saying I'm proud of this this I think is psychologically very helpful helpful for people who are black and proud and helpful for others who say I want to be gay and proud say so the civil rights moment and the black power a moment were very helpful for American society in general the second thing I know I forgot gender is very important and it's all wrapped up in beauty also so that's oh I showed you it's a female skull and this was the moment of beauty and sublime when Beauty is female and small and powerless and sublime is big and so racial beauty Caucasian beauty for blumenbach was female for Emerson the problem was too masculine eyes it and so he turns to violence and by the time we get to say 1900 then we have a fully masculinized teutonic which doesn't work out in the First World War thank you so much the chart that appeared before the caricature showed yes showed the English at 80 percent Nordic and 20% Mediterranean and the Irish 30% and 70% and the Scot 85 and 15 yeah what kind of bothers me being in Mediterranean myself is how does the Irish great 80% sorry 70% as Mediterranean how did that whole concept come about this is this is part of the idea that the Irish are the Celtic race and so if they're the Celtic race they're the primitive race and the primitive race has to be short and dark and dark is Mediterranean so the English are the Saxons and the Irish and the Wealth's and the Scots are the Celts so somebody like thomas carlyle for instance who was actually born kind of right on the border between so he was born in Scotland not that far from Lockerbie but he insisted that he was a Saxon because he was a lowland Scot not a Highland Scot so these are I mean now do you see what I'm talking about okay yeah hi this conversation right now has me thinking are there different ways of seeing not just different ways of classification but just seeing change over time as well yeah there are definitely different ways of seeing and we well one way I'd like to say of seeing is that before about 1970 or so black people were pretty much invisible in American popular culture so if you looked at a magazine if you looked at television every black person of my age can say when you had to drop everything and run to the TV because a black person was on you know that just didn't happen so the face of the United States has changed and we can see non-white people in a way we could not before the MFA show my art school is running right now and one of the works is by a photographer who took pictures of Halle Berry Oprah Winfrey and Will Smith and darkened them and people can't recognize them anymore so you know we we do it appearance carries a message and you can only see what you're primed you can only see what you already know so yes we look differently yeah this is perhaps a follow-up and obviously the the election of President Obama renewed this discussion about where we are in this country in terms of race I was just curious about your reactions of now a year after you're in some after where we are I think that the 2008 election is more a consequence of changes that have been taking place since the mid 90s or so and I experienced these as I've been working on this book I've been working on this book forever since the 20th century and at first people and I taught a class I taught three classes actually at Princeton on this material and at first people were interested in my race you're writing a history of the working title was whiteness and historical perspective and so they would say are you writing it as a black person what are my options [Laughter] and it was as if race would sort of dictate what came out of my word processor but over the passage of these many years that question has subsided and I as I experience it people are more willing to first of all accept that there might be a history of white people and second of all accept that a person in a black body could also be a scholar which is a great step forward yeah so I think that the that the changes already had occurred but as always happens more changes as we go along and there's I don't think there's any end to the changes the things will simply keep changing I don't know what's in future I don't know if we'll start classifying ourselves by Baptist and Presbyterians and Unitarians or whatever or if it'll turn out that the the great divide is between straight and gay or between [Music] people who are handicapped or not or people who don't have the right DNA you know there infinite ways of classifying people I'm sure that there always will be ways of classifying [Music] dr. painter will be signing copies of her new book which we will very conveniently offer you for sale in our lobby as you leave the building please join me in thanking Nell painter [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Miller Center

Views: 344,083

Keywords: Race, Racism, Civil Rights, Law and justice, Education, Jobs

Id: 3CFTzE3gXvQ

Length: 60min 51sec (3651 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020