What Can 'The History of White People' Teach Us About Race in America?

you good afternoon everyone can everyone hear me great thank you so much for being here today it's our pleasure to have you my name is antar Gillespie I'm the director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute and on behalf of our staff and visiting fellows I'd like to welcome you to the 2019 annual James Weldon Johnson lecture this event is the final event of our 2018-2019 public dialogues in race and different series and it happens to be our final public event of the academic year we're so happy that you could join us today before I begin we do have a few announcements and introductions so first restrooms are available outside of the sanctuary both upstairs and downstairs also if you haven't yet please silence your cell phones one more thing and I'm going to remind you of this at the end of the service or this of this talk we're we're in a sanctuary so when this talk is over this sanctuary does actually need to be converted so that it can host a Monday Thursday service today so we will need to exit quickly to allow for that transition to the book signing venue downstairs so if you want to shake hands with dr. painter and meet her we can't do it up here we need to be sure that we do that downstairs it's my pleasure to acknowledge all of the many partners who have helped put this program together this would not have come together without our wonderful staff Rhonda Patrick and Nita Spencer Stephens and Latrice Carter I'd also like to acknowledge the 2018-2019 j wji dissertation and postdoctoral fellows for the last time since they're getting ready to leave their time here so if you could all stand up and be acknowledged in addition I'd like to thank our co-sponsors the Department of History the Institute of African Studies and the Jimmy Carter chair in history in addition to our guest speaker I also want to acknowledge the special guests who are in the audience so dr. Joe Crispino from the history department for instance dr. Randall Burkett our recently retired curator of African American collections and many other wonderful staff and faculty members here so today we're pleased to welcome a speaker who like James Weldon Johnson is the epitome of a polymath dr. Nell Irvin painter earned her undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley and her PhD from Harvard in addition she was also educated at the University of Bordeaux in France and at the University of Ghana West Africa over the course of her academic career she taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill she spent the bulk of her career at Princeton University where from 1997 to 2000 she directed the program in African American Studies she currently serves as the edwards professor emeritus of american history at Princeton dr. painter is the author of eight books and countless articles relating to the history of the American South race and gender dr. painters laid a scholarly work of which she will be speaking today the history of white people guides us through more than 2,000 years of Western civilization illuminating not only the invention of race but also the frequent praise of whiteness dr. painter has won numerous awards throughout her illustrious career I won't be able to name them all but I will just highlight a few she received the Centennial medal of the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences she's been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation the Charles Warren Center for American history the bunting Institute the Center for Advanced Study in the behavioral sciences at Stanford in the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2007 dr. painter served as president of the southern Historical Association and she was president of the Association of American Historians from 2007 to 2008 she's also been a recipient of the brown publication prize awarded by the association of black woman historians after retiring from Princeton dr. painter took up a second career as an artist earning an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and she writes about these experiences in her most recent book entitled old and art school a memoir starting over so without further ado please join me in welcoming dr. Nell Irvin painter thank you hello good people how nice to see you thank you to the James Weldon Johnson Institute and to jerkle SP who has written all about the town where I live Newark New Jersey I have been at Emery before it's been a long time it was when my historian colleague or a Lewis was your Provost and now you have another wonderful colleague of mine Dwight McBride as your Provost so clearly Emery is the place to be my talk today is called what can the history of white people teach us about race in general and I want to stress that I'm talking about a book not about the whole phenomenon and the the phrases in the James Weldon Johnson Institute's mission and vision statement really inspired me because you're saying we are interested in how systems of social distinction shape identities modes of knowing processes of inclusion and exclusion and acts of representation so that's exactly what I'm going to be talking to you about the James Weldon Johnson Institute's mission and vision statements tells us that when we talk about race one of the most important facets of identity in the United States it's not just the census we know that culture and industry influence how we think about identity and racial identity is one of the course of American identity but today I may be taking you in a surprising direction which is very much of our times we talk about ways of thinking about identity racial identity so I'm talking about the history of white people the book which is a work of intellectual history published at a particular point in time I mean all books are published at a particular point in time you know that 2010 so it was during the presidency of Barack Obama it was during the census year when so many people felt that whatever was on the census was what they were as an identity and so many people in my audience who were white said oh I don't want to press the white button I don't want to check white what can I check and I would say we'll check black we need more black people because you were the one who decides but crucially now 2010 was before the presidency of Donald Trump and Trump galvanized discussions and recognitions of white racial identity in a way that had just had never been the case before so a couple of days after the 2016 election I actually wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times called which was entitled what whiteness me in the Trump era so I recommend that to you for a certif brief brief summary of the changes that that election made in the way that millions of Americans thought about racial identity when it meant white now the book the history of white people the book originated from my question of white why white Americans are called Caucasians any of you wondered about that let me see your hand if you wondered about that okay yeah a lot of people some of you didn't even wonder you wonder but you know what I'm gonna ask you next so many of you put your hands up how many of you pursued it how many of you actually chased it down three four okay so this is normal and I would ask people well why if you ask yourself that question and presumably you didn't have the answer why didn't why didn't you track it down but people would say well I don't know it just didn't seem like the right thing to ask or I thought I was supposed to know but you know I wasn't growing up I was sitting in Princeton I'll try to figure out you know many of you had exactly the right response when you heard the title of my most recent book which is all done art school and so I've been on a book tour for that book and over and over people ask me about how I make art do I want something out of my art am i working toward a goal and I say no I make something and then I make something from that and I make something from that and it kind of grows like that that's how I wrote my history books randal the biography of Sojourner Truth started with the question of why what's the difference how this did this this contrast between images of certain Oh truth you remember some of the year old enough to remember women's studies and there was always the image of Sedona truth Sojourner Truth being very and then there so that was the pictorial image that was the vision of Sojourner Truth but if you read what she was supposed to have said a woman how do you put these two together so that was the question for Sojourner Truth and the question for the history of white people was started mm this is grozny which is the capital of Chechnya which is in the Caucasus and a picture very like this it was on the front page of the New York Times it kind of looks like Berlin in 1945 so you know why why are white people in the United States call Chechens so that's where I started I wanted to answer that question why are white people called Chechens so the Russians doesn't integrate Caucasians as southerners as lawless wild summoners and they called him they called them cured me maybe I haven't said that quite right but close enough huh and it means black or dirty or lawless or wild all sorts of terrible things you know things that people say about subdivers so in Russia Caucasian is while southerners whereas in the United States Caucasian is kind of white people so I started my research in Germany because it turns out that that that naming pattern started in Germany in the 18th century where men and young Friedrich blumenbach who's considered the father of physical anthropology invented the fivefold classification which was horizontal it wasn't it wasn't vertical Asian American Caucasian Malay and Ethiopian those were the five big he called them varieties of mankind so blumenbach in the history of white people the book is in Chapter six and you will see in Chapter six that this was based on mostly on skull measurements but also in which skull was the cutest and the Caucasian skull was the cutest I can't take you through the theme that has continued in my art since then the odalisque atlas but let me just tell you that it's a really ugly story but at any rate so the chapters in the history of white people before chapter 6 explained that the idea of classifying people by race appeared in the 18th century in the Enlightenment the great classifier taxonomists carolus linnaeus his great version of his classification of everything in the world the stones the Slavs the snakes all the animals including people this was from 1750 right I don't spell off this I think I'm okay don't let me get too excited because I don't fall backwards so the idea of human difference was not invented in the 18th century obviously people could look around and see that some people are tall and some people are sure some people spend their lives on horseback some people spend their lives living stones some people are if they're Greek civilized and if not they're not they're barbarians but their people have been seeing human difference forever but to call it race as we do today that is something from the 18th century so in Europe it was mainly according to religions Christian Jewish Muslim Protestant Catholic and these were Europeans went to war and killed each other about religion so it was a big deal so the idea of race became useful in the Western Hemisphere in the 18th century when enlightenment science coincided with the burgeoning transatlantic slave trade on an industrial scale so you have two phenomena coming together in the 18th century one is classifying people by race and the other is an industrial scale slave trade so that's part of the reason much of the reason why when we think of enslavement and slave trades we tend to think about the Atlantic slave trade and we tend to think about people and dissent so in the 18th century epistemology the market that is the market for people maritime technology imperialism and wartime politics together created the scheme of racial classification and hierarchy that we recognized today so that since then since the 18th century enlightenment race in the Americas has mostly meant black white has been the various leavings by time place power dynamics beauty of black meaning not black so white has hardly been as carefully scrutinized and historicized and analyzed as black my 2010 book the history of white people changed that dynamic by subjecting the intellectual history of white American race to careful scrutiny so that look is about 500 pages long anybody happen to have a comment on hand I mean one hand okay hold it up and show people how big it is leave it's a really big book thank you see big book so the main conclusion of this really big book is that things change things change there has never been agreement in the short term or over the long term on the number of human races or how to differentiate them from one another should you measure their skulls should you count up their intelligence should you talk about race temperament racial abilities historical leg susceptibility to disease these are all ways that people talk about race but there's never been agreement on how many races there are how many white races there are we'll come back to that so or how you decide where you draw the lines what race means depends on who is speaking to whom they are speaking for what purpose when and where definitions constantly change according to the number of human races and the number of white races so you know that now things change and there has not been agreement there's a really hard part in the history of white people the book that really difficult for readers to understand and that is that the current number of human races and the current number of white race is something that goes back to the middle of the 20th century it is not for all time even after people started designating people hmm okay I have one here but you need this one too sure shall I start again yeah that's okay so the way we think about race now goes back to the middle of the twentieth century at a particular historical juncture in light of the Nazis at a moment when the United States needed solidarity needed to pull in all people to get over the Great Depression and to fight the Second World War so that point anthropologist said there are really only three human races and they were ranked Caucasoid and negroid and the oeid tells you that they are scientific so now we assume that there's one big white race and it's on a toggle switch either you're in it or you're out that was not the case that was not earlier the case so in the 19th century a thinker like Ralph Waldo Emerson could very easily see that there were several white races this was commonplace in science there were several white races the ones at the top were called Teutonic or Saxon or anglo-saxon Ralph Waldo Emerson thought of himself as a Saxon and then there were other white races like the Celtic race because remember Ralph Waldo Emerson lived at the time of heavy impoverished immigration from Ireland are the Irish immigrants of Emerson's time were very poor dirty ignorant people so therefore they belong to an inferior race and then at the turn of the 20th century there was the Eastern European Hebrew race there were there was the northern Italian race there was the southern Italian risk there were all these white races many many many many many white races and then the non-whites were lumped into big categories like Chinese or negro so unless they were in special places like Louisiana Negro or Chinese was not dis disaggregated so for Catholic Irish men were definitely white poor Italian Neapolitan immigrants were definitely white they just belong to inferior white races that was the thinking in the second half of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century they were definitely white they belonged to inferior white race as plural now interestingly enough this kind of thinking wasn't just in the United States for instance the raced racial thinkers in France often said well you know there are two races in France they said the aristocrats belonged to the Teutonic race and the peasants belonged to the Celtic race this was it was respectable to say that and think like that in the 19th and early 20th centuries so my book takes readers from European antiquity before races into the 19th and 20th centuries many white races than one big right race right in to the moment of its publication in 2010 a crucial turning point in the thinking about race is in the mid 20th century I have told you about the mid 20th century remaking simplifying the racial hierarchy into just three races with just one white or Caucasian race something else took place in the middle of the 20th century which is absolutely crucial for what I want to say today and that was the distinction between biology and culture before the middle of the 20th century educated people often put the two together as if your biology dictated your culture biology was seen as more permanent than culture well biology was seen as permanent and dictating your culture but in the mid 20th century the school of France Boas helped us to see the distinction between biology which is your body and your culture which is your language what you eat how you dance how you talk all those things that really can change not only from one generation to another but even within your own lifetime so transpose 1858 to 1942 is the key figure here and I'm gonna come back to him in a moment so my book the history of white people includes the 1960s in the 1970s when American whiteness solidified as one big undifferentiated race as the immortal words of Malcolm X though white man instead of various white races if if you have your book on hand chapter 27 black nationalism and white ethnics talks about the response of white ethnics to Malcolm X and to black power the response was I'm not white I'm Italian I'm not why I'm Irish or maybe I am white but mostly I'm Greek and these became that they thought of themselves as the unmelted ethnics people who were focusing not so much on their white identity but especially on their ethnic identity I'm Italian I'm Jewish I'm Irish gave rise after the 1970s that's a phenomenon called heritage tourism and here's an ad for Italian heritage tourism it's quite taken for granted now that people go to Italy or go to Israel to find their roots or who they really are heritage tourism so the first thing that the history of white people teaches us about race in general is that race is not a biological fact even though race is supposed to be biological race is supposed to be permanent race is supposed to be innate but its definitions change over time and place because race is an ideology and a technology that claims to be biological and it's within that ideology that races biological claims are vast but in our time of heritage tourism we also see a melding of culture and biology and this comes out in our times since the investigation of the human genome and its commercialization as 23andme or ancestry.com or African ancestors of companies that will let you swab your cheek and then tell you who you really are who you really are in terms of your DNA which means biologically so it's as if that turn that Boas gave us in the 20th century it's as if Boas swept aside that we no longer had a distinction between culture and biology that now we have DNA which will tell you who you are so today in many Americans and people in other places as well believe that biology is destiny it's no longer a struggle between nature nurture its nature that tells you who you are hence the appeal of DNA testing businesses this is from 23andme so you can do the cheap one which will only give you your ancestry or you can do the better one that will tell you about your health because supposedly what's going to happen to you in terms of your bodily health is also hidden in your DNA now we might be tempted to think that only white people would do this is that true you're right you're right so if you go to ancestry.com this is just a piece of the screenshot they have several people and one of the figures is an african-american woman named Courtney so Courtney swabs and sins and pays and she discovers that she has links to the akan and the Assante a matrilineal Society of female warriors led in the late 19th century by Queen yeah Asante Wow this remarkable woman fought colonisation in her country and is still revered in Ghana today for her tribution so Courtney who is a light-skinned african-american has a warrior queen in her background and therefore her race is more likely to be warrior queen race now I actually have a master's degree an old master's degree that's 60s in African history and as you mentioned I lived in Ghana and I studied African history before Courtney and before DNA what I just read to you from ancestry.com there's little resemblance to what I learned as African history a long time ago so the 20th century is not the 21st century and usable knowledge about identity and racial identity has changed over time as as you learn in the history of white people the book things change today the ideology of race which with its stress on the crucial role of genetic ancestry in identity has given rise to the expansion of ethnic tourism into the African American market so race in American terms continues like whiteness to change with time and circumstances so let me close by focusing a little bit on the industry growing out of the long term and erroneous linking of biology to culture let's return to Courtney and her DNA results from ancestry.com that linked her to ganas yeah Asante whoa yeah Assunta one 1840 1921 so young Asante wa and 21st century tourism has attracted attention of the scholar Linda our day who wrote a marvelous article called what's tourism got to do with it the yah a Santa WA legacy and the development in a sentiment and what Linda Dayne is doing is pulling together the history of Ghana with the industry of ethnic tourism and she's generalizing this but she happens to be talking about the Asante was anti colonial war in 1902 note that there has been new commemorations of yah Asante wa with the rise of tourism and ethnic tourism so-called countries like Italy which is one of the most visited tourist destinations in the entire world but increasingly now African countries like Ghana are pulling together a usable past so that now there is a celebration of the centenary of the anti colonial war led by yah Asante WA and there are celebrations to honor her her memory but Linda day asked questions about the cultural the construct of cultural authenticity as rooted in heritage tourism and to see how the presentation of a local history is shaped for the the ends of tourism so to recreate the Santa's story much had to be left out and smoothed over for instance why yes Antigua did not win what kind of support she had from other people in a shanty land or in what became the Gold Coast how do you represent those people how do you represent the traders who told the British about yah Asante WA war that yah Asante by herself held slaves how do you present all that for tourism well the answer is you don't and so this is an invitation from the website of Ghana trouble which invites you to witness our unique culture so now in terms of race as black changing in terms of DNA testing and of seeking one's biological ancestry we now have to fold in the capitalistic interest of an industry called tourism thank you [Applause] are wonderful they are provoking talk can everyone hear me great so what we'd like to do now is we'd like to open the floor for questions so we have this microphone set up here and I'm gonna put the mic back here and let you use a question so please feel free to line up if you have questions have a couple of rules so one please make your question a question and then also please keep your question brief and so I will say since we are in a church in the spirit of the black church I will not hesitate to act like a Deaconess and touch your shoulder so without that please feel free to come [Music] thank you for that fascinating talk I'm really surprised to hear that you say you say that the notion of race was created in the middle of the nineteenth century I had understood that what justified slavery was the explorations of the 16th and 15th century and no should the hierarchical notions and the notion of inferiority then rationalized slavery and all of that terrible history so what what was the ideology behind all that if it wasn't race money sorry money money there was any conceptualization of this well the conceptualization the real elaboration comes in the Enlightenment in history of white people I talked to you about sugar and sugar started in what is now the East Indies Indonesia and then came across the the Crusaders discovered it in the what we now think of as the holy land or the the Middle East and then brought the taste to Europe but at that same time roughly was in 1453 when the Ottomans cut off the eastern Mediterranean from Western Europe and that kind of put the damper on the trade in sugar sugar had been produced in the eastern Mediterranean by several kinds of farmers some of them were free some of them were slaves some of them were sharecroppers you know a whole medley of ways of producing sugar but once Constantinople now in stimple was cut off the there needed to be a new source of sugar at that same time the Portuguese discovered that there were they had been sort of edging around looking out for stuff you know we're gonna how are we gonna get our sugar and they discovered that you could get over to what was a newly discovered Western Hemisphere and it was really great for sugar so the sugar industry is the short answer to your question I thank you for your conversation so one of the other things that's happening with regards to the 23andme type folks is actually the criminalization of people based off of the cheek swapping and sometimes the blood testing as well yeah can you speak today no I can't I can say yes I can say you're absolutely right but I can't say more than that because I have not done you know I read the papers that's all I know and I also know that facial recognition software is also being used and it seems that in our political economy just about anything you can invent will be used to lock people up Kiesha Cameron I have been following your work and you listen better yeah yeah I can hear my name is quisha Cameron I've been following you in your work since I read your book just over a year ago your year and a half ago and I know you're an artist as well so I have appreciated the way that you weave stories between those two worlds and I'm a farmer and a fiber producer I've started reading I think it's been Becker's book on Empire cotton and I found it interesting that your response to the gentleman's question pointed to sugar yes and the sugar and I and knowing that that was a large industry but cotton being that kind of revolutionized and set the stage for capitalism yeah so my first question is can you can you talk a little bit more about the cotton industry and then could you also suggest to this young fiber farmer any resources or any like point me towards where I could see more black and brown fiber arts because there's a there's not there's an absence of a lot of that history that's carried for your second question of my Facebook page on friends with people who make quilts but I don't know about fiber artists in the sense of weavers or farmers of color my west coast self is gets what's called fiber shed and this is a concept the fiber Schad is like a watershed you know the watershed is the water that comes into the basin so the fiber shed is where the stuff that becomes fiber comes from so my way into it was through Petaluma California where farmers and people who raised sheep engage in farming practices that are good for the earth and that are also good for the fiber so I can't really be of help but you might want to track down fiber shed fiber shed now as for cotton the traditional places for cotton to come from and to nourish the West that is Europe and then what became the United States was India India and Egypt for the United States cotton didn't become a really big industry until the turn of the 19th century with with the cotton gin which really revolutionized the processing of fiber so that a short staple fiber could be used could be produced for use and for milling without spending too many hours picking this stuff out so sugar is you know this is like the 15th century and for the West cotton is more like the 19th century thank you using microphone yep you know no here here here here yeah this microphone okay there you go Emory has classes for people over 55 there North Druid Hills location and we have many excellent teachers including the one standing back there in many classes that have been investigating the whole topic of race and just one comment I was getting ready to tear up my high school diploma and my college diplomas because all the history that I was taught you know particularly in in Texas but here's my question I just finished reading stamp from the beginning and I become so intrigued with how race is used you know by people in power mm-hmm talk about a propaganda a very you know propaganda through the ages it keeps in the book white rage oh yeah you know it keeps that's a really good book it keeps morphing you know as soon as the genome study came out and said you know we're 99.9% the same then people morphed off into another reason why racism well this kind of business pays yeah it pays my question is your book was written in 2010 and given the last three years or so let's say what would you add or change about your book yeah yeah it just so happens that this fall I will start an artist book with the working title the history of white people for dummies illustrated by the author with comments on American whiteness since Trump it will be an artist book and so for instance you know I started you off by saying that there's this really hard part that people cannot hear that there used to be more in science there used to be more than one right race over and over again I read scholars saying how the Irish became white somehow knoweth not yes book is more persuasive than mine that people really want to be able to read our categories of race backwards and that's why I started you by saying things change things change and so what you're talking about is the racial distinction is like the DNA of the United States as as a nation-state and so it's it's one of the most useful ones along the gender of dividing people up but how people use those concepts that changes by time and place and and the purpose what is the purpose so you're never going to get to one what is the scientific definition of race you're not going to find it because somebody will disagree with you right away and even if you did find it it would change so that simply is not to be we need to accept that race is a very malleable ideology your comments made me think about the eugenics movement in the early part of the 20th century and my question to you is our interest in or our use of DNA potentially opening up the door towards the use of that science for classification purposes similar to race yes yes in the sense that we're bound we somebody is bound to use whatever concept that has a market for it so in the early part of the 20th century they didn't have DNA testing but they did have compulsory sterilization and so that was the policy answer to the idea that some people were genetically I mean they didn't use the name the word genetic but they were biologically inferior the term was feeble-minded and I point out to you that when we think about that kind of policy we tend to assume that it's mainly being used against black people this was not the case of the whole feeble-mindedness stuff surely black people got caught up in it but the the best known cases buck V Bell in Virginia in 1925 was a young white woman and so the people who were sterilized compulsorily sterilized were people of all races so yes you have to be vigilant but it couldn't it's not just DNA I mean people it's you know blue eyes and blonde hair tall any kind of human difference that can be well that can be industrialized basically yeah hello hi you mentioned that bloom and Bosch used both skull measurements and also notions of beauty as our cuteness as you put it as I said Beauty as ways of determining the categories I was hoping you would talk a little bit more about the ways in which standards of beauty our notions of beauty are wrapped up in the way in which we categorize race I've got a whole chapter in Oh bless your heart I'm gonna take you home with me called beauty as a scientific concept because I noticed when I was doing my research and I did a research that over and over again you know there'd be measurements and and there'd be totally not boldly stand there to be charts and everything but this the sensing argument would be plus the blush makes white women computer and that was like this really does it so the art historians have actually written about the use of the blush as an identifying concept I don't talk about the blush I may mention it but mostly I was fascinated that here I come back to Ralph Waldo Emerson who it was important for Emerson his book is called English traits and it's a very race book and he has a chapter in it called race and his point is that his kind of white people are the best and he goes on and on and on about Saxons and how beautiful sacks and men are he takes it back to the north men it's not clear where this Saxony is you know it could be in Denmark it could be Lower Saxony it could be the Netherlands but it's not Saxon like in eastern Germany it's not it's not Dresden it's not life sick it's someplace along the English Channel and these these men were so beautiful that that was Emerson but before that for blumenbach it's it's the female character whose beautiful so his skull his Caucasian skull is his beautiful Georgian skull I am going to Georgia finally this September and I'm gonna take some pictures and bring them back to you so you can see if Georgians really are all that beautiful I once went to an art museum an art gallery in Chelsea in New York where an artist from Georgia I mean the bus' all of the the gallery was about Georgian artists and there was nobody else there but me so I said to the galleries that I said you know there's this the saying this idea that Georgians are the most beautiful people in the world is that true she said yes and she said not only that the term gorgeous comes from Georgians I'll find out but at any rate so the skull was from a woman and one of the reasons that it took me so long to write the history of white people as I was dealing with sources in German and French as well as in English and the cover letter with this skull as it came to blumenbach says that this was the skull of a female Georgian who died of venereal disease she was a sex slave on that happy note opportunity with someone you are national treasure Oh bless your heart the work is so significant thank you so much and I you can see I have your book right here my Kindle I'm curious because it had seemed as if the genome project would lay to rest the issue about race yet today we still have white supremacist what are your thoughts about that just for a moment yeah you're absolutely right and race is very useful it mobilizes people it mobilizes what 30 40 percent of American voters how are you going to resist that as a way of getting your people in office and in power when that is so potent so we're not gonna get away from this real soon but having said that the tenor between like 2000 when President Clinton says you know race is useless we're all 99.9 99 99 appoint the same and then in about two thousand four or five a pharmaceutical company discovered that you could market blood-pressure medicine too according to DNA supposed to be better for black people so you know who's a black person well the people whose doctors prescribed this I suppose and then DNA was industrialized and it became a paying industry so maybe we need some paying industries that undo some of this but it will get not undone but it will subside it will subside because there are so many more non black Americans now recognizing what you said about you know what you were taught in school or what the commonplaces of the the culture tells you about race there's so many more non black Americans who are now willing to hear what black Americans have been saying about race for all these well getting on for centuries now so I don't think it will be forever what it's like now but it's true now is a tough time hi this has been a presentation is awesome man thank you this is just stimulating stimulating up a lot of questions in my mind I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about the impact and/or fall out of the racial construct relative to its its impact on African Americans people of color in this idea of assimilation ie families in the early part of the 20th century in Karori leaving much later encouraging their offspring to marry light-colored people so that they can acculturate simulate much much easier colorism is a thing colorism is a real thing i live in a neighborhood in newark that is largely Latino and every day every morning my dear husband goes down to the little deli and he buys the New York Times and the star-ledger so we get a paper from New Jersey and to get a paper from a national paper and when I look at the images in the state paper in the national paper I see a multiracial world when I walk around the iron Bell I never see a dark-skinned latina the culture in the commercial culture in the Ironbound of Newark is a colorist culture so looking forward when Latinos are 50% of the population will have all that colorism work to do all over you really filled in the gap for me okay I was concerned with my understanding when you talked about the 20th century in kind of the mid 20th century and the voice classification in the three groups my mind immediately went to the work that I work on in the human rights and the human rights declaration with the United Nations that came about at the same time it did what influence did your research reveal was impacted by that declaration the short answer is I don't know I don't know but the United Nations came out of that same culture influenced by boas and the really anti-racist no they were not anti-racist Franz Boas believed that race was a thing he just didn't believe there should be racial discrimination so I guess you would kind of call him an anti rate you know you see what I mean and in during the Second World War he and his students are rather his students because he died in 1942 he died with a cigar in a glass of wine at lunch in the Columbia University Faculty Club just keeled over 1942 that's a little early so at that point it was anthropologist who were felt to hold the truth about how to classify people and so they made pamphlets which circulated in which the people who were writing about human rights would have known so I'm sure that that is the same epistemological world I think so but I can't thank you excuse me Naomi King Martin Luther King's sister law ad Kings wife who was also killed a decade yes swimming pool yeah she spoke here recently and she's a friend and she's trying to lead a movement to unite humanitarians to unite people back based on race religion in the country 1.3 trillion dollars goes towards were strangers kill strangers do you think it's I really admired her and I was wondering if you think that something like this could have a long-term impact for future generations for future generations only if it is incorporated made into something like the United Nations and has millions of people with it if it but my sense is that if this is a local is it local national international well she would like to take it internationally thank God schools send on it like public schools yeah I think that each one of these efforts makes a difference you know a long long time ago I was an assistant professor and I taught at the University of Pennsylvania and I taught for the first and last time african-american history and by the time we got through the year the students said oh all these horrible things happen what's the use and I said well think of what they would have would have happened if there hadn't been all this pushback and I thought of a metaphor for change and that is like the sand dunes sand dunes are made of grains of sand but they they make islands they make continents so every every effort makes a difference as a historian I see very very little that last two centuries you know people have sometime asked me how will people read my books in a hundred years and I say people will not be reading my books in a hundred years books don't last that long so most things don't last that long but they can be really important at the time and in the place it add a border mentioned one other thing that's a medical student and the hospital Brady Hospital and they were taking blood pressures and blacks in particular have board strokes or Jackson kidney disease and the professor there suggested that I as a medical student do study of that mm-hmm and his father was Elbert Tuttle senior who desegregated the South the federal court judge and we did that study and then got a big grant and then with courthouse medical school went to Africa and there were about a thousand of us and who started the International Society of hypertension and lies mm-hmm and it's I think had some major hopefully some major impact thank you so much for being here dr. painter I'm also a historian here at Emory and I use your work in my classes that's so effective so it's just really an honor to see you here at my campus one of the questions I have based on your talk is what are some of the global processes used to wedge whiteness was consolidated in the mid-to-late 20th century and if you have time for a second question can you talk a little bit about your writing life and how you remain so prolific okay I I wouldn't say that whiteness was consolidated in the 20th century I would say that various institutions were consolidated let's see as you were talking I was thinking about imperialism in political imperialism kind of strength in the late 20th century I see from the times that there are new kinds of imperialism's every day based on debt and development so I whiteness is too big a thing to work kind of in in lockstep and it tends to be an explanation [Music] sometimes in regimes like apartheid it can be a cause but usually it's an explanation for something and that explanation may or may not carry into another place so I would say look for the details rather than the big concept was there another part of your question that I missed hmm Oh writing writing let's see the last book I wrote was old in art school which took about three four years is that right three four years and it was really hard to start because it's a different kind of writing and it's a very honest book and I didn't know I could be that honest in writing and telling you what's in my heart and I knew that I would have to talk about what a pathetic little person I had become in art graduate school I didn't know that I could talk to you about how my mother's death made me feel that my time was very limited without my realizing that it was her death that was making via feel that way and make a mistake in applying to graduate school when I did was a bad decision so I wrote a chapter called a bad decision I didn't know I could do that so took some time and it took like four or five drafts to get to the book and I could not have done it without two artists residency's that took me away from home because when you're at home everything needs to be done so I did an artist residency at you Cross Foundation in Wyoming and a residency at McDowell in New Hampshire and I hope to go back to McDowell in the fall to start work on the history of white people for dummies I can't do it when I stay home it's just plus being I I now realized that I have a new vocation which is author of creative nonfiction which is a full-time job just editing and promoting and traveling plus the history of white people came out in French at the end of January and so I was in France in February and in March and in Norway in February to talk about those books and I can't just bound off the plane and start whatever needs to be done so this is a long way of saying I probably am not gonna write anymore until my next artist residency which I recommend to all of you who are writers or scholars leave home hello I just a short question which is that I think a lot about what dr. John Powell says when he talks about the need to transform the meaning of whiteness and I'm curious if you had any thoughts on what that might look like yeah I actually wrote another op-ed in The New York Times about that in 1915 if you just either go to my website my website has three parts one part is no painter historian the middle part is old in art school which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award didn't get it but it was a finalist and the other part is artists oh look under the history part and you were just search for them the New York Times homepage and it came out about the time of Rachel Dolezal so they asked me to write kind of about Rachel Dolezal my sense was poor Rachel Dolezal her mother how did her your mother that is a family drama if you ask me and I feel about blackness like I feel about gay marriage that if gay people marry it takes nothing away from my heterosexual marriage and if Rachel Dolezal wants to be black and is doing anti-racist work it takes nothing away from my blackness so I was gonna write that but then that Nazi killed 15 people who invited him into their church for a prayer service so doc gave it another spin so I said white people need another identity so this is before Trump gave them a unity and I said there is actually a word that people could use if they're engaged in anti-racist work and that is abolitionists we have we have a history of anti-racist white four and anti-racist white people should use that history and use the word abolitionist okay thank you so much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Emory University

Views: 32,914

Rating: 4.3772454 out of 5

Keywords: Emory

Id: ijQNSJH4jBY

Length: 76min 7sec (4567 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 26 2019