6 Quotes by Nell Irvin Painter

Evolutionary biologists now reckon that the six to seven billion people now living share the same small number of ancestors living two or three thousand years ago. These circumstances make nonsense of anybody’s pretensions to find a pure racial ancestry.

This millennium of Venetian and Iberian hegemony barely appears in American white race history as it jelled over the past two hundred years. Rather, race-chauvinist history depends on Tacitus’s ancient Germani and medieval German heroes called Saxons. The race narrative ignores early European slavery and the mixing it entailed, leading today’s readers to find the idea of white slavery far-fetched. But in the land we now call Europe, most slaves were white, and that fact was unremarkable.

It is important to notice that when Emerson said “American,” he meant male white people of a certain socioeconomic standing – his. Without his saying so directly, his definition of American excluded non-Christians and virtually all poor whites. Native American Indians and African Americans did not count. In English Traits, when he tallies up the American population, Emerson explicitly excludes the enslaved and skips over native peoples entirely.4.

It is still assumed, wrongly, that slavery anywhere in the world must rest on a foundation of racial difference. Time and again, the better classes have concluded that those people deserve their lot; it must be something within them that puts them at the bottom. In modern times, we recognize this kind of reasoning as it relates to black race, but in other times the same logic was applied to people who were white, especially when they were impoverished immigrants seeking work.

In the second place, the term “Caucasian” as a designation for white people originates in concepts of beauty related to the white slave trade from eastern Europe, and whiteness remains embedded in visions of beauty found in art history and popular culture.

I could not abandon the rest of me, even when the rest of me overwhelmed my art.