The History of White People (65 page)
Read The History of White People Online
Authors: Nell Irvin Painter
Tags: #History, #Politics, #bought-and-paid-for, #Non-Fiction, #Sociology
27
Fausto-Sterling, “Refashioning Race,” 17–18. It is often assumed that sickle-cell anemia occurs only among African-descended people, which is not the case. The sickling trait evolved in malarial regions, and people descended from such places, e.g., Italy and Greece, are also susceptible to sickle-cell anemia.
28
Michael J. Bamshad and Steve E. Olson, “Does Race Exist?”
Scientific American.com
10 Nov. 2003. Bamshad and Olson conclude, “If races are defined as genetically discrete groups, no. But researchers can use some genetic information to group individuals into clusters with medical relevance.” Also Troy Duster, “Race and Reification in Science,”
Science
307, no. 5712 (18 Feb. 2005): 1050–51. See also
Wikipedia
, “Isosorbide dinitrate/hydralazine,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Isosorbide_dinitrate/ hydralazine, and BiDil’s website, headlined, “Prescription Drug for African Americans with Heart Disease,” and showing an Asian American M.D. and an African American patient, http://www.bidil.com/.
29
The material in this section comes from several sources: Nina G. Jablonski and George Chaplin, “The Evolution of Human Skin Coloration,”
Journal of Human Evolution
39 (2000): 57–106, and “Skin Deep,”
Scientific American
, Oct. 2002, pp. 74–82; and R. L. Lamason, V. A. Canfield, and K. C. Cheng, “SLC24A5, a Putative Cation Exchanger, Affects Pigmentation in Zebrafish and Humans,”
Science
310 (Dec. 16, 2006): 1782–86. See also Rick Weiss, “Scientists Find a DNA Change That Accounts For White Skin,”
Washington Post
, 16 Dec. 2005, p. A01,
ScientificAmerican.com
, 16 Dec. 2005, Christen Brownlee,
Science News Online
, week of 17 Dec. 2005 (vol. 168, no. 25), and
Wikipedia
: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color.
30
Aravinda Chakravarti, “Kinship: Race Relations,”
Nature
457 (22 Jan. 2009): no pagination.
31
Consider Newark, New Jersey, a place supposedly characterized by “ruin, a town known only for murder, blight, and feckless negritude…a state of spiritual and moral zombiehood…angry Zulus…a Mugabe manqué…the Heart of Newark Darkness.” Scott Rabb, “The Battle of Newark,”
Esquire
, July 2008, pp. 66–73, 116–17.
Chapter 1, figure 1. Courtesy of Maps.com.
Chapter 4, figure 1. http://kaukasus.blogspot.com/2007/04/young-georgian-girl.html, 29 April 2007, and http://www.flickr.com/photos/24298774@N00/108738272.
Chapter 4, figure 2. http://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Image:Ossetian _girl_1883.jpg.
Chapter 4, figure 3. Courtesy Sovfoto, Inc.
Chapter 4, figure 4. Courtesy Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Gift of the Homer Family.
Chapter 4, figure 5. Courtesy Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y., Louvre, Paris, France.
Chapter 4, figure 6. Courtesy Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y., Louvre, Paris, France.
Chapter 4, figure 7. Gift of William Wilson Corcoran. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 4, figure 8. Courtesy Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Chapter 4, figure 9. Copyright © 2009 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Musée d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.
Chapter 4, figure 10. “Book Cover” from
Orientalism
by Edward Said. Copyright © 1978 by Edward Said. Used by permission of Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Chapter 4, figure 11. Courtesy Thomas Zummer.
Chapter 5, figure 1. Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, N.Y.
Chapter 5, figure 2. Alinari/Art Resource, N.Y.
Chapter 5, figure 3. Courtesy Princeton University Archives. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library.
Chapter 5, figure 4. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Chapter 6, figure 1. Courtesy Niedersächsische Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek, Gottingen, Germany.
Chapter 6, figure 4. Courtesy Sovfoto, Inc.
Chapter 6, figure 5. Courtesy Niedersächsische Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen, Germany.
Chapter 6, figure 7. Courtesy Gleimhaus Literaturmuseum, Halberstadt, Germany.
Chapter 7, figure 1. Bildarchiv Preussicher Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, N.Y.
Chapter 8, figure 1. Courtesy Princeton University Archives, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
Chapter 8, figure 2. Courtesy Princeton University Archives, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
Chapter 8, figure 3. Courtesy Art Resource. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, N.Y.
Chapter 8, figure 4. Courtesy of the Yale University Library.
Chapter 10, figure 1. Courtesy Concord Free Public Library.
Chapter 10, figure 2. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.
Chapter 14, figure 2. Courtesy MIT Museum.
Chapter 15, figure 9. Courtesy
New York Times
archives.
Chapter 16, figure 1. Courtesy American Philosophical Society.
Chapter 17, figure 2. Courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society, WHS Image ID 63842.
Chapter 18, figure 2. Courtesy American Philosophical Society.
Chapter 18, figure 3. Courtesy Stanford University Archives.
Chapter 19, figure 1. Courtesy Arthur Estabrook Papers, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University of Albany Libraries (SUNY Albany).
Chapter 22, figure 1. Courtesy
Time
magazine.
Chapter 22, figure 2. Courtesy Picture History.
Chapter 22, figure 3. Photograph © 2010 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Chapter 22, figure 4. Photograph © 2010 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Chapter 24, figure 1. Courtesy Special Collections, Vassar College Library.
Chapter 24, figure 2. Map from “The Races of Mankind,” copyright 1943 by The Public Affairs Committee, Inc., from
Race: Science and Politics
, by Ruth Benedict. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
Chapter 25, figure 1. Courtesy Princeton University Archives, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library.
Chapter 25, figure 2. Courtesy Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota.
Chapter 26, figure 1. Courtesy Picture History.
Chapter 27, figure 1. Malcom X at a Harlem civil rights rally © Bettman/CORBIS. Chapter 28, figure 1.
Measuring America: The Decennial Censuses from 1790 to 2000
. (US Department of Commerce, US Census Bureau, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office), 2002: 100.
We usually assume definitions of race as color to be straightforward, as though “black” Americans were always dark-skinned. But the long American history of racial adjudication—of deciding who counted legally as black and white—belies any strong equivalence between race as color and actual color of skin.
William Sanders Scarborough (1852–1926) was a founder of the American Philological Association, which asked him not to attend meetings after 1909.
Although Arthur de Gobineau’s racial reasoning in
Essay on the Inequality of the Races
was wrongheaded in the extreme, he did grasp one fact of human history: economic development leads to demographic mixing, as the demand for labor draws in people from afar.
Although Hippocrates of Kos (ca. 460–ca. 380 BCE) became a legendary practitioner of medicine, his works come from a variety of hands, not just his. The island of Kos lies in the southeastern Aegean Sea near the historic city of Halicarnassus, Turkey.
Hecataeus’s works include
Periegesis
(
Description of the Earth
) in two volumes: Europe and Asia.
Periegesis
survives as 330 very short fragments. In addition, Hecataeus wrote
Genealogies
(also called
Histories
or “researches”), a biographical dictionary of Greek heroes.
Graz is the capital of Styria (in German, Steiermark), famous for wine and a relatively dolce vita.
The portrait of Herodotus accompanying the
Encyclopædia Britannica Online
article comes from a Roman cult sculpture copied from a Greek original from the first half of the fourth century BCE.
Herodotus’s description of the Colchians in what is now Georgia on the Black Sea is in 2.104–5. He concluded from their dark skin, curly hair, and circumcised penises that Colchians descended from Egyptian armies. Needless to say, this observation has set off a lively controversy between Afrocentrics, who take this remark as corroboration of the spread of Egyptian, i.e., African power, and skeptics, who take Herodotus’s comment on Colchians as cause to doubt his reliability as a historian.
Michael Novak, in
The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics
, quotes a harrowing scene from Jerzy Kosinski’s
The Painted Bird
(1965) in which a similar warrior (identified variously as Kalmuck, Tartar, or Russian) on horseback savagely rapes a captive maiden. We shall encounter Kalmucks again soon.
Sevastopol and Yalta, the most famous names of the mild Crimean wine region of southern Russia and eastern Ukraine, now designate health resorts.
Hippocrates adds that female servants from other, unnamed peoples were active and slender. Unlike the Scythian women, they easily became pregnant.
Herodotus also mentions a tribute of five boys along with ivory that the Ethiopians owed Persia every third year.
Polybius’s ideas about governmental checks and balances inspired drafters of the Constitution of the United States.
The white slave trade in laborers and sex trade workers from eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Ukraine, now into western Europe and the United States, reappeared in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union deprived these regions of overweening state power and its police protection.
Romans also divided Gaul in two other ways: between
Gallia Togata,
or the domesticated, Toga-Wearing Gaul, and the more barbaric
Gallia Comata,
or Hairy Gaul.
An aristocrat from the central Auvergne, Vercingetorix was from near today’s city of Clermont-Ferrand, where his equestrian statue now stands in the central square. In my copy of
The Gallic War
, each of the first six books encompasses between fourteen and thirty-one pages; book 7, on Vercingetorix and the great revolt, is fifty-two pages long.
François de Belleforest used the phrase in 1579 while describing Hugh Capet’s recapture of power from the Frankish aristocracy.
The main characters in the
Astérix
comic books all have names built around puns playing on the common French “que” suffix’s similarity to Gallic names ending in “rix.” Thus “Astérix” comes from the idea of star in the French
astérisque
(asterisk); “Obélix” from
obélisque
(obelisk); “Idéfix” from
idée fixe
(fixed idea or obsession); “Assurancetourix” from
assurance tous risques
(comprehensive insurance),
Cétautomatix
from
c’est automatique
(it’s automatic); and
Ordralfabétix
from
ordre alphabétique
(alphabetical order).