HUMANITIES - MID

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Who Invented White People?1

For many people, race is the most powerful aspect of identity. Certainly, it is among the most

complex and controversial ways that we define ourselves and each other. The history of

relations among races, not just in the United States by around the world, is an often sobering

story of conflict, discrimination, and violence. In the United States, the legacy of slavery seems

to influence any discussion of race, and very often, discussions of race relations and racial

identity focus on what it means to be Black in America. But [in the past couple of decades,] a

number of scholars and social critics have argued that when it comes to addressing the

complexities and problems associated with race, we should be focusing attention not exclusively

on Blacks or Latinos or Native Americans or people of color; rather, we should be looking at

Whiteness. One of these scholars is Gregory Jay (b. 1952), a professor of English at the

University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Like many other scholars interested in understanding

race, Jay believes that the way we tend to discuss issues related to race makes “Whiteness”

invisible. Whenever we discuss race, we discuss people of color but not Whiteness itself. And

that’s a problem, he believes, because it assumes that Whiteness is the standard by which other

races are understood. In other words, according to Jay when we examine how various racial

categories are understood, we also have to look at Whiteness as a racial category; to avoid

examining Whiteness as a racial category is to give it special status. In this way, how we discuss

race both conveys and reinforces certain messages about the status of racial categories.

In the provocative essay that follows, which was originally delivered as a speech on Martin

Luther King, Jr., Day in 1998, Jay explains how the racial category of White emerged from

historical and cultural developments. He argues that only by understanding “where White

people came from” can we hope to address longstanding conflicts and injustices associated with

race. It is a challenging task, one that reminds us that there are profound consequences to how

we define others.

“Who Invented White People?” by Dr. Gregory Jay

“What is it for? What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the

construction of what is loosely described as ‘American?’”

--Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

This week we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. day. What should our celebration focus on, and

how can we best continue the work that he began? For most of us, Dr. King represents the

1 Jay, Gregory S. “Who Invented White People?.” The Thompson Reader: Conversations in Context. Ed. Yagelski, Robert. Thomson/Heinle Publishers, (2007): 96-102. Copyright statement: These materials may be used in schools and colleges; permission to reprint is required for publishers and other web sites.”

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modern Civil Rights Movement. That movement was a struggle against the legal and social

practice of racial discrimination—against everything from separate drinking fountains, white

and colored public bathrooms, and segregated schools and lunch counters to the more subtle,

everyday prejudices of ignorance and injustice that are common in America. The Civil Rights

Act of 1965 is among Dr. King’s greatest legacies, transforming the face of America more

decisively than almost any other legislation since the Civil War. Dr. King gave his life for the fight

against injustice, and as we survey the changes in thirty years since then we must say that his

was a great and glorious victory.

Yet the “promised land” still eludes us. Once the crude legal structures of discrimination were

torn down, Americans faced the fact that changing the laws did not change the feelings and

beliefs of individuals, black or white. Beyond the abstract words of law and legislation, real

people continued to carry with them the history of racism, whether as victims of its horrors or

as beneficiaries of its privileges. To this day, racial discrimination remains pervasive in America.

. . . Most of us could pluck examples out of the newspaper every day. This is not the legacy that

Dr. King envisioned when he stood on the mountain top and saw his dream.

What keeps racism alive in America? I don’t pretend to be the one to know the answer to this

question. It’s a question, however, that every one of us needs to ask. We need to ask it not

only of ourselves, looking into our hearts, but to ask it of each other—to ask our friends, our

family, our coworkers, and our church members. But in talking about race, what, exactly should

we talk about? I want to propose today that we talk about whiteness. Too often in America,

we talk about race as if it were only something that people of color have, or only something we

need to talk about when we talk about African Americans or Asian Americans or American

Indians or Latino Americans. One thing that has changed radically since the death of Dr. King is

that most white people do not want to call themselves white people, or see themselves in racial

terms. From the days of the founding fathers until the Civil Rights movement, “white” was a

common term in the law as well as society. Federal, state, and local officials regular passed

laws containing the word “white,” defining everything from slavery and citizenship to where

people could sit on a bus. Today, the movement against racism has had the unexpected effect

of letting whiteness off the hook. Over and over we hear people say that “race shouldn’t

matter,” that we should, or even do, have a “color blind society.” What has happened, I think,

is that we have instead created a blindness to whiteness, or been blinded by whiteness itself. .

. .

The trouble, then, with the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, with Black History Month, and

such token expressions of concern is that they once more “ghettoize” the question of race.

Worse, they tend to make race a “black matter,” something that we only discuss when we talk

about African Americans, as if they were the ones with a race. By distracting our glance, such

tokenism once more blinds us to the race that is all around us . . . . As the Nobel Prize-winning

black author Toni Morrison has argued, in her wonderful book titled Playing in the Dark:

Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), . . . [many] great writers of the American

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tradition tell the story of whiteness over and over. White identify defines itself against the

backdrop of an African or colored presence: [for example,] Ishmael and Queequeg in Herman

Melville’s novel Moby Dick (1851), or Huck and Jim in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn (1884) . . .right up through any number of black-white “buddy” films made in

Hollywood. Ironically, white Americans can only define themselves by comparison to that

which they are not, and so whiteness depends on blackness for its very definition.

Where did white people come from, anyway? Who invented whiteness? Scholars of race

generally agree that the modern meaning of whiteness emerges in the centuries of European

colonialism and imperialism that followed the [European] Renaissance [of the 1400 and 1500s].

Now granted, human beings have always clustered themselves in groups—families, clans,

tribes, ethnic populations, nation states, etc.—and these groups have regularly been the source

of discrimination and violence. At times it seems than an “us versus them” mentality starts on

every playground and extends into every neighborhood, society, and government. Since

human beings appear to require a sense of identity, and since identity is constructed by

defining whom and what you are different from, it may be that the politics of difference will

never be erased from human affairs.

That said, why did something called “racial” difference become so important in people’s sense

of their identity? Before the age of [European] exploration, group differences were largely

based on language, religion, and geography. The word “Race” referred rather loosely to a

population group that shared a language, customs, social behaviors, and other cultural

characteristics—as in [what used to be referred to as] “the French race” or “the Russian race”

or “the Spanish race” (differences we might now call “ethnic” rather than “racial.” As European

adventurers, traders, and colonists accelerated their activities in Africa and Asia and the

Americas, there emerged the need to create a single large distinction for differentiating

between the colonizers and the colonized, or the slave traders and the enslaved. At first,

religious distinctions maintained their preeminence, as the Africans and American Indians were

dubbed pagans, heathens, barbarians, or savages—that is, as creatures without the benefits of

Christian civilization or perhaps, even as creatures without souls. Efforts to Christianize the

Indians and the Africans, however, were never separate from efforts to steal their lands or

exploit their labor. To justify such practices, Europeans needs a difference greater than

religions, for religious justifications melted away once the Indian or African converted.

. . . Beginning in the 1500s, Europeans began to develop what became known as “scientific

racism,” the attempt to construct a biological rather than cultural definition of race. Biological

races were said to predict and determine the cultural traits of peoples, so that cultural

differences could be “explained” on a “scientific” basis. Scientific racism divided the world’s

populations into a few large species or groups. By the nineteenth century, race scientists

settled on the term “Caucasians,” first used as a synonym for Europeans in 1807, probably

because the term’s association with the Near East and Greece suited white people’s desire to

see themselves as having originated in the Golden Age of Classical Civilization. Caucasian

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usually appeared in a list of “major” race groups including also Mongolian (people of Asian

descent), Ethiopian (people of African descent), and American Indian.

The fantasy of a “white race” with historical origins in Classical civilization white-washed the

complexion of Greece and Rome (whose people were a mixture of Mediterranean, Semitic, and

African populations each bringing unique cultural traditions to the table.) Postulating a direct

biological descent from this Classical fantasy to the present helped justify contemporary racist

practices. White plantation owners in the American South, for example, built their plantations

according to Neo-Classical architecture (as did the architects of our nation’s capitol), so that the

slave master’s mansion would recall the Parthenon of Ancient Greece, suggesting a racial

continuity between the Classical forefathers and the slave owners. In the construction of

whiteness, it was regularly said that slavery and democracy were not a contradiction, since the

ancient Greeks had themselves been slave owners and regularly persecuted races considered

“barbarians.” What was good enough for the “original whites,” it was thought, was good

enough for the people of Virginia and South Carolina and Mississippi (an argument that was not

widely contested by white Americans in the North).

Whiteness, then, emerged as what we now call a “pan-ethnic” category, as a way of merging a

variety of European ethnic populations into a single “race,” especially so as to distinguish them

from people with whom they had very particular legal and political relations—Africans, Asians,

American Indians—that were not equal to their relations with one another as whites. But what

of America as the great “melting pot”? When we read our history, we come to see that the

“melting pot” never included certain darker ingredients, and never produced a substance that

was anything but white. Take, for example, that first and most famous essay on the question

“What is an American?” In 1781, an immigrant Frenchman turned New York farmer named

Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur published his book Letters from an American Farmer. Here are

some of lines from its most quoted pages:

…whence came all these people? They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French,

Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race now called

Americans have arisen. What then is the American, this new man? He is either an

European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood,

which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose

grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French

woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an

American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new

ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and

the new rank he holds. . . . The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here

they are incorporated into one of the finest systems of population which has ever

appeared . . .

No longer a European, the American represents a new race made from the stock of various

European nations. No mention is made of Africans or Indians, perhaps because this new

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American race does indeed receive new prejudices from the new mode of life it has embraced.

Crèvecoeur candidly describes the process by which the American race originated as a white

race; or rather, the way in which the descendants of Europeans constructed a myth of

themselves as a white race with special claim on the answer to the question “What is an

American?” An American was a white man. Just as importantly, America was that place where

the downtrodden classes of Europe could throw off the oppression of aristocrats and attain not

only fraternal equality among themselves, but superiority over those who were not of the new

white race. When the Constitution of the United States was written, it thus specifically

enshrined slavery into law and denied citizenship to enslaved Africans. When the

Naturalization Act of 1789 was made law, it stipulated that only “whites” were eligible for

naturalization as citizens (a clause persistently contested by people of Chinese and Japanese

ancestry for the next 150 years).

. . . “Whiteness,” of course is a delusion . . . Scientists today agree that there is no such thing as

“race,” at least when analyzed in terms of genetics or behavioral variation. Every human

population is a mongrel population, full of people descended from various places and with

widely differing physical qualities. Racial purity is the most absurd delusion, since intermarriage

and miscegenation [the interbreeding of people considered to be of different racial types] have

been far more the norm than the exception throughout human ethnic history. “Race,” then, is

what academics like to call a “socially constructed” reality. Race is a reality in the sense that

people experience it is as real and base much of their behavior on it. Race, however, is only

real because certain social institutions and practices make it real . . . . [It] is the result of human

effort, not a prescription from nature or God. Thus the concept of race can have little or no

foundation, yet it can still be the force that makes or breaks someone’s life, or the life of a

people or a nation.

[ . . . ]