Wesley Yang, a talented and provocative writer, has just published a review of The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter. To my surprise, I learned more from A.D. Powell’s learned, if needlessly harsh, review on Amazon.com:

The author gives a very distorted history of whiteness as a racial category. The ultimate racial question facing American elites has always been how to divide one “race” from another given the reality of racial mixture. Painter makes the false statement that a “one drop” rule forcing “blackness” on predominately white people has always been law in American. False! She has not read the latest research showing that, not only did antebellum states legally allow varying amounts of “black blood” into the “white race,” but “acting whiteness” or exercising the rights and social obligations of white people would raise people from “colored” to “white” even if the official “blood” quota was not met. The unenforceable “one drop” laws only came into existence (in SOME states) in the 20th century in connection with the eugenics movement. Instead of referencing excellent works on this subject such as What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America and Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise And Triumph of the One-drop Rule, Painter presents the worthless novel “Marie” as accurate history. If you want to read a detailed, accurate description of racial mixture and Creole society, the best book on the subject is White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana.

I have read White By Definition, which is excellent and does offer a very different portrait of Creole society. Powell goes on to cite the work of other scholars who’ve complicated contemporary racial narratives.

Painter mentions Josiah Knott but seems totally unaware of how his racist theory of “mulatto inferiority” was quoted into the 20th century by judges sentencing couples for breaking “miscegenation laws.” She does not understand how the existence of white slaves (both “mixed” and “pure”) inspired and outraged the abolitionist movement and the nascent Republican Party. For that history, you can read The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War: A New Look at the Slavery Issue.
The author barely spends time on Mexicans and other Hispanics, even though the issue of determining whether or not they should be considered “white” (despite both Indian and African ancestry) is essential to any history of “whiteness.” An excellent book on this subject is The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (American Crossroads, 2).
It is important to know that even notorious racists like Walter Plecker (a name Painter SHOULD know) failed to force mixed whites to become “Negroes” when the intended victims resisted those efforts. The Melungeons are the prime example: Walking Toward The Sunset: The Melungeons Of Appalachia (Melungeons: History, Culture, Ethnicity, & Literature) and The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People : An Untold Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America.
Anyone who has read Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race will be disgusted with the way it has been upstaged by Painter’s far inferior book. American immigration law’s obsession with determining when Asians can be called “white” should have been given a lot of attention. Read White by Law 10th Anniversary Edition: The Legal Construction of Race (Critical America Series).

It’s been years since I’ve read Whiteness of a Different Color, but it centers on an aspect of racial history that Matt Yglesias and I both find interesting, namely the process through which racial boundaries shift over time.

I was disappointed to read Wesley Yang write the following:

“Being white is not what it used to be,” Nell Irwin Painter observes at the close of The History of White People. But it has never been what it purported to be. For starters, it has never been a biological reality. As the molecular geneticists have demonstrated, all humans share 99.99 per cent of the human genome, and within the groupings that we have come to think of as “races” there are genetic variations as large as those that exist between them.
Neither has the “white race” ever been a stable or coherent cultural category. It is instead one of the many complex, ever-changing, and self-contradictory just-so stories that certain people told about who they were and why they were entitled to the world they had conquered.

The latter half of the excerpt, on how the “white race” is an unstable cultural category, strikes me as entirely unobjectionable. But the first part elides the fact that racial differences are manifestly genetic, as Armand LeRoi of Imperial College London explains:

But there’s one aspect of human inheritance that people are resolutely ignoring. And that is normal human variety. Or, to put it more crisply: race. If we look around the world we find that people look very different from each other. These differences are manifestly genetic. They must be. That’s why people’s kids look like them. Yet we know nothing about that variety. We don’t know what the differences are between white skin and black skin, European skin versus African skin. What I mean is we don’t know what the genetic basis of that is. This is actually amazing. I mean, here’s a trait, trivial as it may be, about which wars have been fought, which is one of the great fault lines in society, around which people construct their identities as nothing else. And yet we haven’t the foggiest idea what the genetic basis of this is. It’s amazing. Why is that?
The reason is two-fold. The first—which is not such a trivial problem—is that skin colour is not controlled by one gene. If it were only one gene we’d know it. It’s many genes—more than three but certainly fewer than 30. It’s a difficult problem, although, frankly, it’s not such a difficult problem that if geneticists really wanted to solve it, they couldn’t. It’d be easy enough to do if they put a fraction of the effort that went into discovering the BRCA1, the breast cancer gene. I’m not saying they should; finding the breast cancer gene is more important than discovering the genetic basis of white and black skin, but still, it’s not a technically impossible thing to do. But of course the fundamental reason why people don’t do it is because it’s race genetics. It’s because of the long and sorry history of genetics andracial differences. And indeed, more than that, the whole thrust of genetics since the war has been to argue that races don’t exist and that they are just social constructs. This is very much the Harvard School — Dick Lewontin for example has been one of the big proponents of this point of view. The late Stephen Jay Gould was another.

LeRoi then delves into the historical origins of this lacuna in the miserable history of race genetics before suggesting that we “grow up”:

The result of this history — which has been partly driven by data, and partly by ideology — is that these days anthropologists and geneticists overwhelmingly emphasise the similarities among people from different parts of the world at the expense of the differences. From a political point of view I have no doubt that’s a fine thing. But I suggest that it’s time that we grew up. I would like to suggest that actually by emphasizing the similarities but ignoring the differences, we are turning away from one of the most beautiful problems that modern biology has left: namely, what is the genetic basis of the normal variety of differences between us? What gives a Han Chinese child the curve of her eye? The curve I read once described by an eminent Sinologist as the purest of all curves. What is the source of that curve? And what gives a Solomon Islander his black-verging-on-purple skin? Or what makes red hair? [Emphasis added.]

This strikes me as exactly right. Racial hierarchies have been rightly discredited. But normal human variety is real.

In a New York Times op-ed published in 2005, LeRoi offered a useful way of thinking about racial differences. He cites the work of Richard Lewontin:

If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans. A few years later he wrote that the continued popularity of race as an idea was an “indication of the power of socioeconomically based ideology over the supposed objectivity of knowledge.” Most scientists are thoughtful, liberal-minded and socially aware people. It was just what they wanted to hear.

Yet Lewontin made an error in reasoning, first pointed out by A. W. F. Edwards, a statistician at Cambridge:

If one were asked to judge the ancestry of 100 New Yorkers, one could look at the color of their skin. That would do much to single out the Europeans, but little to distinguish the Senegalese from the Solomon Islanders. The same is true for any other feature of our bodies. The shapes of our eyes, noses and skulls; the color of our eyes and our hair; the heaviness, height and hairiness of our bodies are all, individually, poor guides to ancestry.
But this is not true when the features are taken together. Certain skin colors tend to go with certain kinds of eyes, noses, skulls and bodies. When we glance at a stranger’s face we use those associations to infer what continent, or even what country, he or his ancestors came from – and we usually get it right. To put it more abstractly, human physical variation is correlated; and correlations contain information.
Genetic variants that aren’t written on our faces, but that can be detected only in the genome, show similar correlations. It is these correlations that Dr. Lewontin seems to have ignored. In essence, he looked at one gene at a time and failed to see races. But if many – a few hundred – variable genes are considered simultaneously, then it is very easy to do so. Indeed, a 2002 study by scientists at the University of Southern California and Stanford showed that if a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia – more or less the major races of traditional anthropology.

I should emphasize that the intentions behind the notion that normal human variety is not a biological reality are clearly good. But I happen to think that the idea of human equality is fully compatible with normal human variety.