Sep 14, 2017 02:57 AM
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-white-people-w...ht-in-1613
EXCERPT: [...] Both examples might seem surprising to contemporary readers, but they serve to prove the historian Nell Irvin Painter’s reminder in *The History of White People* (2010) that ‘race is an idea, not a fact’. Middleton alone didn’t invent the idea of whiteness, but the fact that anyone could definitely be the author of such a phrase, one that seems so obvious from a modern perspective, underscores Painter’s point. By examining how and when racial concepts became hardened, we can see how historically conditional these concepts are. There’s nothing essential about them.
As the literature scholar Roxann Wheeler reminds us in The Complexion of Race (2000), there was ‘an earlier moment in which biological racism… [was] not inevitable’. Since Europeans didn’t always think of themselves as ‘white’, there is good reason to think that race is socially constructed, indeed arbitrary. If the idea of ‘white people’ (and thus every other ‘race’ as well) has a history – and a short one at that – then the concept itself is based less on any kind of biological reality than it is in the variable contingencies of social construction. There are plenty of ways that one can categorise humanity, and using colour is merely a relatively recent one....
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/how-white-people-w...ht-in-1613
EXCERPT: [...] Both examples might seem surprising to contemporary readers, but they serve to prove the historian Nell Irvin Painter’s reminder in *The History of White People* (2010) that ‘race is an idea, not a fact’. Middleton alone didn’t invent the idea of whiteness, but the fact that anyone could definitely be the author of such a phrase, one that seems so obvious from a modern perspective, underscores Painter’s point. By examining how and when racial concepts became hardened, we can see how historically conditional these concepts are. There’s nothing essential about them.
As the literature scholar Roxann Wheeler reminds us in The Complexion of Race (2000), there was ‘an earlier moment in which biological racism… [was] not inevitable’. Since Europeans didn’t always think of themselves as ‘white’, there is good reason to think that race is socially constructed, indeed arbitrary. If the idea of ‘white people’ (and thus every other ‘race’ as well) has a history – and a short one at that – then the concept itself is based less on any kind of biological reality than it is in the variable contingencies of social construction. There are plenty of ways that one can categorise humanity, and using colour is merely a relatively recent one....
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/how-white-people-w...ht-in-1613