Eric Foner: The History of White People
In 1855, Abraham Lincoln, then making his living as an Illinois lawyer, represented William Dungey, a dark-complexioned man who was suing his brother-in-law for slander for referring to Dungey as “Black Bill, a Negro.” Lincoln challenged the veracity of defense depositions that claimed that Dungey was known to be of mixed racial ancestry. Dungey was actually Portuguese, Lincoln told the jury. “My client is not a Negro,” he added, “though it is no crime to be a Negro—no crime to be born with a black skin.” Lincoln won the case, and Dungey received an award of $600. Had he lost, Dungey would have been stripped of the right to vote and been subject to imprisonment, as he was married to a white woman. Illinois law did make it a crime, under certain circumstances, to be “born with a black skin.”...
Such cases demonstrate two essential qualities of race as a historical category. First, as scholars have argued for decades, race is socially constructed rather than a scientifc concept or timeless biological reality. Ideas and practices related to race change over time and differ from one country to another. The United States has traditionally operated according to the “one-drop” rule, whereby ancestry, not simply appearance, determines whether one is white or black. Thus, a white woman can give birth to a black child, while a black woman cannot give birth to a white child, even if the children look exactly the same. If his country adopted the American defnition in reverse, Haitian dictator Francois Duvalier once quipped, 98 percent of his people would be white.
No matter how arbitrary or absurd, racial designations have real consequences. In the United States, being white confers concrete benefts: economic, political, social, and psychological. The past generation has seen a proliferation of academic studies that explore these benefts through the history of whiteness. Originating among labor historians dismayed by Ronald Reagan’s success in wooing white working-class voters, the study of whiteness as a source of personal identity dovetailed with the “cultural turn,” the shift of historians’ attention to discourse and symbolism. The concept of whiteness soon spread into other fields, including law, literature, and cultural studies....
This point is implicit in Nell Irvin Painter’s book, The History of White People. Despite its formidable title, the book is a highly selective account of the evolution of racial thought. Indeed, the book slights the history of whiteness as a lived experience. More than a concept, whiteness is part of a system of allocating power and resources. One learns much from Painter about racial thinking but little about white supremacy as a historical phenomenon or present-day reality....
Painter devotes three full chapters to Ralph Waldo Emerson, far more attention than she gives to any other race theorist. She calls him the “philosopher king of American white race theory,” although exactly why remains unclear. (Emerson’s name does not even appear in the index of The Black Image in the White Mind, George M. Fredrickson’s classic study of nineteenth-century racial thought.) Painter points out that Emerson delivered popular lectures on the “Genius of the Anglo-Saxon Race” and argued in English Traits (not one of his more widely-read books) that racial “stock” determines national destiny and that American liberty derives from the nation’s “Saxon” origins. These ideas were hardly unique to Emerson. They were disseminated in the era’s magazines and newspapers and in the writings of Francis Parkman and George Bancroft, whose influential racialized narratives of American national development go unmentioned in Painter’s volume.
Painter seems to feel that scholars have given Emerson an undeserved reputation for broad-mindedness by emphasizing his musings in private journals about the emergence of a “new race” in America that would combine Europeans, Polynesians, and even “the Africans.” But as Peter S. Field pointed out in an excellent study of Emerson, English Traits represents only one facet of Emerson’s thought, not the entire corpus. Emerson’s utopianism distinguished him from the pessimistic sensibility of European race theorists, who feared the contamination of Western civilization by “inferior” races. More to the point, Emerson’s racial thinking was not frozen in place, as Painter seems to suggest. He came to believe that by fighting in the Union Army during the Civil War, blacks could disprove accusations of innate inferiority. During Reconstruction, Emerson endorsed the Radical Republican platform, which rested on equal civil and political rights for blacks.
Painter’s treatment of Emerson points indirectly to an absence in the book: the voices of those who challenged dominant views of race. She discusses briefy the black critics of racism David Walker and Hosea Easton, but ignores Frederick Douglass, perhaps the era’s most eloquent critic of racial inequality in American life. Indeed, the entire abolitionist movement gets short shrift, which is unfortunate, because abolitionists articulated an alternative vision of American nationality in which persons of all races enjoyed equality before the law and were protected by a benefcent national state. Painter tends to equate the writings of theorists with the views of society at large....